Lukas Beeler's IT Blog

I’ve spent the entire day at the Kongresshaus Zürich, attending Microsoft TechDays 2007.

In general, i enjoyed this first part of the event. As always, the Kongresshaus has severe logistical problems, they don’t have enough parking space. Microsoft offered free parking at Albisgüetli, but that is about 15 minutes away.

So instead i choose to go early, and parked right next to the Kongresshaus – arrived at 08:15, and there was still plenty of parking space available. At 27.- CHF for the entire day, it didn’t come cheap, though.

Microsoft seems to have moved back from stickers to lanyards, and there were croissons available in the morning.

The Keynote was very good, held by a guy named Rafal Lukawiecki. A review on security in the past, and in the future. Very interesting, and very well done.

The next on the list was about Windows Sharepoint Services, but aimed at developers (which i didn’t really pay attention too, when choosing). Even though i’m not a developer, it was very interesting to see the architecture behind WSS.

I then attended a talk about Exchange HA & Disaster Recovery – i enjoyed this one too, but i think the title was a bit misleading, it concentrated on backups and reasons for disasters.

It was interesting to hear that he saw incorrectly configured anti virus software as the main reason for exchange full restore – i couldn’t really believe this, because it didn’t look like this guy worked with Small Businesses. He even wrote an Article about this topic on msexchange.org. While listening, i enjoyed that it seems i did everything right in the setups i did in the past, which was very reassuring.

Next was something about Windows Storage Server, or file serving from windows in general. It was very well, with a very competent speaker. It was also interesting to see that Microsoft is entering the Backup Market with DPM – at competitive prices, even though DPM requires a seperate server, which is a bit of a letdown. DFS/DFS-R was also covered very well, though there wasn’t anything there new to me.

What i wondered was that it seems that even though most people attending TechDays aren’t exacly working in SMBs didn’t know much about DFS. I assumed that most bigger companies were already using this.

At that point, i called it a day and went home. Stay tuned for the next part.