Tech.Ed Europe - day 1 wrap up

Yesterday was the first day of TechEd Europe (what happened to Middle East and Africa?). Berlin was a first for me, but apart from the weather, all is good here in Deutschland.

My first day started of with two sessions, one of which was about Windows Server 2008 R2, which is generally available by now. Nice and intereseting (but not new) session about the AD recycle bin, Powershell for AD and Djoin.exe (the easy way to join machines to your domain).

Second session was one by Mark Minasi, who I like as a speaker very much. Seldom to find good English, thorough knowledge and a sense of humor in one speaker

The keynote hit of at 3.30pm, with a nice opening and focussed mostly on what MSFT calls "The New Efficiency". Herein different technologies combine to make our lives easier. These include Windows Server 2008 R2, Exchange 2010 and Windows 7.

After the Efficiency intro, the official launch of Exchange 2010 was a fact! The demo by Julia White included all the new and cool feature of Exchange 2010 (online mailbox move, mailtips and Outlook Webapp)

The last part of the keynote included a number of System Center products such as SCOM, SCCM and SCVMM, all running on Windows Server 2008 R2. The demo of the Power Management - Management pack for SCOM with SCCVM combined, showed the feature to shutdown a physical host when the load of the combined virtual machines can be supported by fewer physical machines. This minimizes the carbon footprint of your datacenter.

The evening was all about the Fall of Wall memorial, very impressive to witness!

More on day 2, later!