TechReady9 Day 3 Wrap-up

Day 3 kicked off with a keynote by Ray Ozzie and several very cool demos on UI futures, what’s coming across some of the Bing features, and some stuff MSR is working on. There was also a good discussion of how concepts move from MSR, to Labs, then into the product groups.

Next up was a very entertaining session with Jeff Woolsey, the Hyper-V program manager and president of the “virtualization nation”. This session dealt point by point with the FUD put out there by the competition. Aside from the entertainment, it was actually quite valuable because we get hit with some of these outlandish claims by customers all the time who’ve drank the cool-aid of the other guys.

Next up was a session on Terminal Services, which is being re-branded as Remote Desktop Services (RDS). Most of the new features in R2 were discussed (RDP 7, multi-monitor support, VDI) with some cool demos. One showed a six monitor setup over RDP with full multi-monitor support (I use three at home…)

After lunch was a session on the next version of OCS. Voice and PBX replacement are the key themes of this release, beyond that I can’t say much about the content.

In the afternoon I attended a session on VDI using the Microsoft and Citrix solution. This was an intro session to the deep dive that I’m doing today with the RDS PM and some Citrix colleagues. Good session, some good demos of the combined functionality that the two companies provide and how the solution is more fully featured and less expensive than the competition.

The day wrapped up in the evening with “Ask the Experts” which is an event where all the presenters and product group folks are stationed at tables in main dining area and the Techready attendees can come in and ask questions, network, etc. It’s a great opportunity to meet folks from the product groups as well as others you may not have seen in a while. Every year I bump into people I haven’t seen in years or who have recently joined Microsoft that I worked with before. This year was no different.

Day 4 should be action packed, I present during the 10:15 timeslot on VDI.