Final Day

So today was the fifth and final day of TechReady – my annual “chip in the back of the head”.  I think I may be getting too old for all this – early starts, late finishes, too much beer, not enough sleep – I still enjoy the learning though (you’re never too old to learn)…

Today’s keynote presentation wasn’t (a presentation); it was an open Q&A session with both Kevin Johnson and Jeff Raikes.  Kevin is the Co-President of our Platform division and Jeff is the President of our Business division (so between them they know pretty much everything that’s going on inside Microsoft).  They got to answer some pretty good questions, but to be honest they didn’t tell us anything that we didn’t already know:  Google is a big competitor, Search is a big thing, Windows Vista is great, Office 12 will be fantastic, etc…

I did learn quite a bit about System Centre Data Protection Manager 2006 (DPM) https://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/dpm/default.mspx which as you know is our “backup to disk” solution.  I got to talk to some of the product group guys and had a chance to “play” with the product.  It’s extremely easy to setup and use, and the end user experience is exactly the same as if the Volume Shadow Copies were taken locally.  DPM keeps a centralised replica of the file data on the managed servers and it keeps this replica in sync by just passing over the network the bytes of data that have changed on the managed servers.  The replica is not always in sync, we take snapshots at regular intervals (one hour is the default), so the worst case scenario is that you could loose one hour of work (which is a lot better than what you have now).

I also got to learn a lot more about Windows Vista – today I got to find out what we are doing to make it more Reliable.  More info on Vista can be found here: https://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista on our new look site.

I got to see some more great demonstrations of Exchange 12 and both Outlook 12 and the new Outlook Web Access (which I was convinced was actually Outlook until someone pointed it out to me) – it’s going to be extremely good…

That’s it from me for now – I’m out for my last evening in Seattle and have an early start tomorrow (at half past five) for my long trip home - I won’t get back to my house until mid-morning Sunday.

Dave.