Adi Stoian

TechEd Europe 2009 - Day 4

Thursday I had two shifts at the Service Manager booth, basicaly the entire interval exhibition was open, but hey, I was free on Tuesday and attended all the interesting sessions :-).
This year they had a separate hall for all Microsoft stands - the Technical Learning Center (TLC). One third was dedicated to The New Efficiency campaign, which grouped the products launched this fall: Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange Server 2010 together with management and security products - System Center and Forefront families.
On the other side were all product booths and Microsoft Learning. There were also six Interactive Theaters placed in the exhibition area, these were small size rooms (up to 50 places) for discussions, interactive sessions and demos. These are modeled by the Birds-of-a-feather breakout sessions that become a norm in the TechEd North America.

The System Center product booths were in the New Efficiency area. I guess a short introduction of the products presented is in order:
First it was the System Center Configuration Manager booth, served by the omnipresent Wally Mead and Configuration Manager MVPs: Jannes Alink, Torsten Meringer and Ronni Pedersen (he actually went at the conference as a registered attendee, but stayed pretty much all the time at the booth helping in answering customer questions.

Operations Manager booth was next. Here I had the chance to meet Filip Lazar, a Romanian who is part of the Operations Manager team in Redmond and was a speaker at the conference. He stayed a lot at the booth, and I think he enjoyed to discuss with the customers and getting feedback on the product.

Next it was the System Center Essentials 2010 booth. Vladimir Meloski, an MVP from Macedonia, with whom I worked several times at the Hands-on Labs on previous TechEds, was here. David Mills form the product team joined at the booth all week (when he was not presenting). They had product demos for System Center Essentials 2010 Beta.

Data Protection Manager booth was staffed by two gentlemans from MCS Austria. They presented both the current version - Data Protection Manager 2007 SP1 and the future version

Service Manager booth was on the right side, just near the alley, so a lot of people were passing by, and stopped to ask questions. Especially after the first presentation about Service Manager on Tuesday, a lot of attendees came by, just to learn about the functionalities of the product. Booth was staffed by Maarten Goet from Inovativ (colleague with Jannes Allink), Arie de Haan a consultant from Belgium, and myself.

On the other side was Virtual Machine Manager booth and they were busy presenting the new features of the new Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2.