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 ...