Vegas was great again, this year; the hotel was as lovely as ever, but the overlap with the Latin Grammys sure did some interesting things to the elevators. Mandalay Bay felt full this year! On the other hand, the beach remodel was excellent; the wave pool and the Lazy River pool were both hits with my family. As is my wont, I'm making my session slide decks available for download.
- EXC16: Advanced Exchange Protection using Data Protection Manager
Backing up and restoring Exchange servers is an essential part of keeping your messaging infrastructure up and running, even when you’re running an advanced clustering configuration. Why should you consider using the new version of Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (“v2“) to protect your Exchange server clusters? Is it any harder than backing up standalone servers? This session covers protecting Exchange 2003 and 2007 servers clustered configurations, including the new Exchange 2007 replication options.
I thought this session went pretty well; there was a Microsoft session on Tuesday morning that looked like it was going to cover the exact same material, but the overlap was both smaller and shallower than I expected. I got a lot of good questions from this session which I'll be answering in the next couple of days; I really hope that I was able to convey my own excitement about DPM and how it will make a great partner for protecting Exchange.
- EXC17: Exchange Management Shell Annoyances
The Exchange 2007 Management Shell makes full use of the exciting new Windows PowerShell technology. It’s a great command-line management experience, but it’s still not perfect. You may have already been tripped up by annoyances and complications in what seem to be obvious tasks or you may just want to know what dangers lurk beneath the surface. This session will show you some common pitfalls and problems and give you the knowledge to successfully navigate them.
This session suffered from the inevitable technical glitches; my Exchange virtual environment died an hour or two before the session, so I ended up having to run it from a stock Windows PowerShell session. Luckily, I was able to cover most of the territory from there and even add a couple of things or two. Not having the Get-Help and cmdlet completion information for EMS, though, just sucked; my apologies.
- EXC18: Getting Run Over by Exchange 2007
Common knowledge says that upgrading to Exchange 2007 isn’t nearly as hard as the upgrade from Exchange 5.5. That’s not to say that it doesn’t present its own set of challenges—and if you’re caught by them, it will still feel like getting run over by a truck. This session will present some of the common gotchas and how to avoid them. Be at the head of the upgrade parade, not caught in the wheels.
Wow. This was a great session; standing room only and a lot of good feedback and questions. This is clearly a topic of concern to people -- if you have any other upgrade gotchas, let me know!