2005-06-09

Sengupta, David. Tech-Ed Days 3-4. Jun 9, 2005.

Well yesterday went by pretty quickly for me ... Charlie Chung and I delivered our MSG 358 session on Managing Exchange Server with Microsoft Operations Manager ... it went well and we had some good questions afterwards. During my part of the session I focused on reporting in the MOM 2005 context and talked about the native Microsoft Exchange 2003 Management Pack reports (focused on Health i.e., performance and availability), the free (to MOM 2005 customers that is) Quest Exchange Reporting Management Pack (focused on advanced Exchange traffic analysis), the still-future Microsoft Service Level Agreement (SLA) Solution Accelerator (focused on scorecarding and trending data collected via MOM 2005 + Microsoft Exchange MP and using System Center Reporting Manager 2005 ... when it ships ... beta for SLA SA is coming later in June) ... and finally I talked about the Dynamic Configuration Manager (DCM) Solution Accelerator (focused on configuration ... which will permit creation of a configuration "manifest" for each of five Exchange Server roles - mailbox, public folder, front-end, internet gateway and bridgehead - and then reporting of servers that are out of compliance ... and will require SMS 2003 + System Center Reporting Manager 2005 ... when it ships ... beta for DCM SA will also be later in June). Bottom line things went well and we scored reasonably high which was good. Today I attended one talk - namely Kieran's discussion of Exchange compliance - was well done as always and the crowd seemed to be pretty interested. Most folks in the Exchange world are new to thinking about compliance, especially the 'holy grail' of legal compliance that Kieran was discussing ... so it was amusing to see folks start to think about some of the points Kieran raised. His comparison of "adverse inference" with pregnancy was great ... and I appreciated his pointing folks to BPI0008 and ISO 15801.

2005-06-07

Sengupta, David. Tech-Ed Day 2. Jun 7, 2005.

Some brief comments on today's events. Keynote by Paul Flessner (and MC-ed by Samantha Bee) highlighted SQL Server 2005 and alot of the developer benefits in VS2005 ... Paul announced the launch of SQL Server 2005, BizTalk Server 2006 and Visual Studio 2005 will all happen the week of November 7, 2005. Had a nice demo of SQL Server 2005 64-bit edition performance & scale (along with expected but impressively high TPC-C and TPC-H benchmark results), along with some of the fail-over capabilities ... assisted by a $28,000 "BattleBot" that Microsoft contracted ASPSOFT to create to showcase intelligent business logic ... and to use in destroying a network switch with it's ax as part of the demonstration. Also had a demo of RFID technologies using the RFID tags that many of us have been carrying around all week for the demonstration. Finally the usual slew of press releases today ... noteworthy ones follow. Extensions of SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services: Xcelsius (enterprise dashboards as part of their Xcelsius XRS solution), Fenestrae (extensions to SWL Server 2005 Reporting Services), and ActiveReports for .NET from Data Dynamics, Ltd. Also manageability press from TNT Software announcing their ELM Enterprise Manager 4.0 offering. That's all for now ...

Reuters. E-mail retention a must after Morgan Stanley case. CNET News.com. May 21, 2005.

E-mail retention a must after Morgan Stanley case | CNET News.com I like the bit about "legal Chernobyl" ...

2005-06-06

Sengupta, David. Tech-Ed Day 1. Jun 6, 2005.

Orlando - Tech-Ed officially kicked off this morning with a keynote from Steve Balmer. Some of the interesting tidbits I noted were:- focus on five main IT pains: (a) one identity and password, (b) online presence, (c) network access, (d) synchronization (i.e. "can't my Blackberry do this now" :-) ), (e) self service ... with (f) rights management coming in close sixth- alot of talk around DSI and the "New World of Work" (see microsoft.com)- increasing importance of connecting people & information, self-service, manageability- demo of windows explorer in Longhorn with ability to quickly filter down to items of interest (similar to quickfilter in Excel plus keyword search capability ... and with a zoomable thumbnail browser)- nice demo of heterogeneous manageabilty with MOM 2005 of Solaris system ... Keynote aside, interesting to see who's visible here and who's not. Notably NetIQ isn't all over sponsorship this year ... haven't seen a peep from them yet. Quest obviously is all over this (great!) along with typical HP, CA, Intel, Etc. Also notably Zenprise is making some noise here ... specifically about their 'patent-pending' Correlation, Causation & Correction algorithm. Symantec with the expected attention on anti-virus ... also on their LiveState Client Management Suite, their LiveState Patch Manager, LiveState Recovery Manager 3.0 (not to be confused with Quest's Recovery Manager ... different focus with no Exchange play) and their Symantec Discovery soution focused on client discovery and manageability. And Mimosa is of course continuing to drive their new archival solution. That's all for now ...