Alfa BBT

Day 2 of the conference starts with Microsoft showing of his latest technologies. It’s nice to see the show once in a while but it’s also the presentation where you learn the least of the entire conference. (And I didn’t win a laptop either).

Here’s a shortlist of the items touched upon:

KeyNote: IT in a Transformative Time

You can watch see this KeyNote @ TechNet Edge.

Arlindo Alves

First of all Arlindo Alves makes some publicity for this own shop and introduces the material available for it pro’s:

• New TechNet website
• Communities etc…

Luc Van De Velde

Next we’re being introduced to the NUI (Natural User Interface e.g. voice) as oppose to the GUI.

Via the 1pad, a HP Compaq TC100 slate pc introduced in 2003, we end up in a discussion about the W7 acceptance rates.

You can’t go anywhere without hearing about “the cloud”; so on premise, private and public clouds lead us to the Azure.

Tony Krijnen, Daniel van Soest & Arlindo Alves

Arlindo called in his colleagues from the Netherlands for some help with a couple of demos:

• W7 deployment demo: manual vs. using the deployment toolkit
• Outlook 2010, Outlook Web App
• Windows phone 7
• Direct access: Especially the search connectors, which offer you an integrated search experience, looked interesting.
• Network Access Protection (NAP)
• Some Hyper-V stuff

Followed by a little Exchange Server demo to end the party.

Managing W2K8R2 and W7 with PowerShell V2 (Corey Hynes)

I still remember Corey from his presentation from last year. It’s one of those guys that give you the feeling they could talk for hours.

He quickly explains why you would want to use PowerShell for your management tasks. After quickly touching upon Sapien PrimalForms and the Core Configurator we look into one to one remoting, what are the differences between

invoke-command

and

new-pssession

and how can these be combined with the PowerShell modules available on a system:

• TroubleshootingPack
• ActiveDirectory
• ServerManager
• GroupPolicy

The next step is one-to-many remoting which can either be done by specifying multiple computer names separated by comma for the “-computer” parameter of looping through a input list or the results of an AD-query using a foreach statement.

Chalk Talk

We popped into a Chalk Talk session from the community after a quick sandwich. The part we attended to mainly covered cloud computing.

What’s W2K8R2 gone do for your AD (John Craddock)

John resorts to the start-demo script powershell script to show off some of the new ad cmdlets. We get to look at the AD Admin Center and the AD Best Practice Analyzer.

The remaining improvements brought to us by Windows Server 2008 R2 are

• AD Admin Center
• AD Best Practice Analyzer
• Managed Service Accounts
• Offline Domain Join
• Authentication Mechanism Assurance: higher (or lower) permissions depending on your method of authentication
• AD Recycle Bin

Building your virtualization infra in a ideal world (Kurt Roggen)

The first presentation of the afternoon is always seems the hardest to stay focused on. In this case it felt like a wall of sound was coming down on me. I had to make an effort to filter the message out of it.

Content wise we discussed the hardware features to pay attention to in a Hyper-V deployment. Guess most of it also applies when using any other Hypervisor.

Recovery of AD deleted objects and W2K8R2 Recycle Bin (John Craddock)

Wake up call! John starts with dumping and AD database and opening it with notepad. He goes on with deleting and restoring a user object in AD only to show us the problem with linked attributes:

• “Manager” vs. “Direct Reports”
• “Membership” vs. “MemberOff” In the process he reaches for a couple of tools to provide us with a couple of different views:
• LDF
• Sysinternals ADRestore
• REPAdmin Requirements for implementing the AD Recycle Bin introduced with Windows Server 2008 R2.

Managing your identities with ForeFront Identity Manager 2010 (Jorge De Almeida Pinto)

Never had the chance to work with this type of solutions myself but as an administrator who typically has to keep track of rather large number of accounts in different systems I certainly see a number of interesting use cases in it.

Using this kind of technology for syncing GALs for instance. Or having a consolidated workflow which tackles the process of generating the accounts in different forests, incident management tools, access badges etc etc…

I’ll be attending TechDays next week. I like to prepare myself a bit in advance so that I know where I can find “the place to be” at any given time. Luckily MS made it a lot easier for us to assemble a custom agenda compared to last year. Perhaps somebody read my comments or they got some more complaints?

You can compile your own agenda here. The tools allows you to actually mark the sessions of your interest and then hide all the others:

I will obviously focus on Exchange Server related sessions and fill the blanks with some other stuff that carries my interest:

On top of that there are also a couple of sessions organized by various user communities during the lunch breaks. I might attend one or the other too:

I have the intent to blog about this event like I did last year. I’m thinking of bringing my netbook with me. It would be nice not having to type over my paper notes and save some time.