I never make New Years resolutions because I’ve always thought they were pitfalls for failure and most of the time forgotten by January 21st.  However, this year I have some [...]]]> Well.. I run 1920×1200 resolution at home and 3 monitors at 1600×1200 at work… think I will strive for 2560×2048 and 1920×1200 respectively. ok that was lame.

I never make New Years resolutions because I’ve always thought they were pitfalls for failure and most of the time forgotten by January 21st.  However, this year I have some goals that I want to pursue and what better way to wrap them up than by claiming them as New Years resolutions?

The obligatory “Get into shape and lose x number of pounds”. Actually, I want to work on my conditioning the first 6 months of 2011 as I want to start training in July for a marathon in January 2012.  It’s a Rock’n Roll marathon in Phoenix, AZ and I ran it in 2005.  My goal is to improve on my 2005 time by 1hr 10 mins, but I will be satisfied with dropping 40 mins.   Developing a schedule and sticking to it will be critical.

Professional Growth.  I’m now the Team Lead/Architect for my group.  I touch a number of major technologies.  I want to get certified in the technologies that I spend the most amount of time with.  I’ve always had the opinion of “meh” when it comes to IT Certifications, but I’ve recently had a different outlook on taking a test and striving to complete the certification that aligns with your experience as something you have should do to remain attractive in the job market and validate your skills and experience to your current employer.

Two areas of technology excite me and I believe they are the direction of the industry and this is where I’ll focus over the next 12 months.

Messaging, Collaboration(UCC), and Mobility – Exchange 2007/2010, Office Communication Server 2007/Lync Server 2010, Email Archiving,  BlackBerry Enterprise Server, GOOD Technology, iOS, BlackBerry, Android, and Windows Phone 7.

2011 Goal: Achieve MCITP status for Exchange 2010 and Lync 2010.  I’m still debating about finishing my Exchange 2007 MCITP status.  I have 1 of the 3 required tests complete.  I don’t think it’d be terribly difficult to study up and pass the remaining two.

CLOUD! –  Vmware & Hyper-V R2, Cisco UCS, Storage, and Management tools.

2011 Goal: Work towards VCP status, training budget pending of course.  VMware requires a mandatory 5 day class before you can take the test.

Here’s to a successful 2011!

TechEd thus far has been great.  Meet some really smart people, got a lot of information, and had some fun along the way.

I spent much all of the day in Hyper-V related sessions.  I have to say I’m really impressed with the capabilities and performance stats [...]]]> Just noticed this was never published.  Publishing…..

TechEd thus far has been great.  Meet some really smart people, got a lot of information, and had some fun along the way.

Day 2

I spent much all of the day in Hyper-V related sessions.  I have to say I’m really impressed with the capabilities and performance stats that Hyper-V R2 brings to the table.   We were introduced to the new SP1 features as well, including Dynamic Memory and RemoteFX.

I went offsite to an HP research event for Exchange Architects.  It was an NDA event, so I can’t state what we spoke about and saw as it relates to HP, but I did enjoy talking to the other participants.  There were approximately 12 of us, with infrastructures ranging from 25 users and a couple with 100,000+ users, discussing how we’ve deployed 2007/2010 and comparing notes.  It’s always good to hear how the large user count shops deploy.

After the conference I attended DoubleTake & Riverbed’s ClusterFunk party at The Republic.  They had a band, Clusterfunk, which is actually composed of DoubleTake’s employee’s including the CEO.

Day 3

I began Day 3 with two of the more technical sessions I attended during the entire show.  Hyper-V Performance Analysis followed by Exchange 2010 High Availability Deep Dive.  I was mentally spent after both of these sessions, but took away some great information.

I followed these sessions up with some Hands on Labs.  I focused mainly on PowerShell, Failover Clustering, and Hyper-V.   I found the labs to be ok but a tad bit short.  Given there were 192 different labs available, I understand the brevity of the labs themselves.  Microsoft had a repeating presentation on the infrastructure hosting the labs.  All powered and automated on Hyper-V and  HP hardware.  It was definitely impressive.

After the conference I attended Quest’s Tweetup at Bourbon Street Blues Company.

Sessions

This is my first time [...]]]> Day 1 was quite the experience.  From the huge amounts of attendees trying to walk, and ultimately coming to a halt, in a 25 foot wide hallway of session conference rooms, to getting to participate on an Exchange round table at the Rustynail with members of Exchange product team.

Sessions

This is my first time attending TechEd so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect.  I had heard mainly good things about it, but some “eeehhh” things.
After getting my Starbucks – they have one INSIDE the convention center – YES! – I found my seat in the jam packed keynote hall . Things started off with the Keynote which was lead by Microsoft’s Bob Muglia.  You can catch a web reply version here.  I, along with other attendees, thought it was a bit drawn out and could have been condensed.  There was two cool technologies that were demoed; The next version of Office Communications Server – rebranded as Microsoft Communications Server 2010.  We’re looking at deploying this when it RTM’s later this fall.  The client is extremely simplified for the users and eash to understand – something that hasn’t been Microsoft’s strong point.  They also demoed parts of the System Center Suite, namely Virtual Machine Manager 2011 Beta, which appears to bring a bucket full of new features.  It ended with Microsoft’s Tony Scott, their CIO, who isn’t presenter material.  I think his monotone voice put half the hall to sleep.

Following the keynote there were foundational sessions, none of which were interesting, so I opt’d to hit the exhibition floor and pick up swag.  Yup, the recession is over, vendors are giving away T-shirts regularly and offering varying raffles of Netbooks, iPads, and Xbox 360′s.

My afternoon was spent in breakout sessions.  Two were good, one, not so much.  Surprising the one that sucked was around automating IT with PowerShell – which I thought would have been great.  Let me explain, the subject is good, the presentation wasn’t.

Post Sessions

After the final session, there was an Exhibit Reception which was a way to get and keep attendees talking and providing vendors with the oh so important contact information to receive spam post conference.  I will say, offering tons of food and an open bar is a great way to achieve this.

After the Exhibition Reception, I headed over to the Exchange Roundtable that Jeff Guillet from Expta.com put together with about 20-25 other Exchange crazies.  He arranged for members of the Exchange product team to attend and participate in our discussions, notably Ross Smitth IV and Scott Schnoll.  It was a great evening and I enjoyed talking to the folks that attended.  There was a gentlemen that I actually didn’t get his name, but he was from Sweden and 1 of 5 Microsoft Certified Masters – Exchange 2010 in the world.  He shared that experience amongst many others.

Good times.