TEC 2010 - Day 1

Well, day one of The Experts Conference is now over and I can say I'm pretty impressed.  The technical depth of the sessions is great and the sessions are just long enough to get through it all without making you anxious to move on.

My day started at 7:00am with a nice breakfast in the Platinum lobby.  Good food and fresh fruit, but nearly no place to sit or put your plate.  A few tables and chairs would be helpful.

My first session was presented by Konstantin Ryvkin.  It was a two hour deep dive into Exchange 2010 enterprise deployment and architecture at Microsoft and it was excellent.  Great way to start the conference.

Next up was an in depth look at Exchange 2010 Architecture with the legendary Ross Smith IV (Microsoft, aka Mr. Spreadsheet).  This session described the architecture, scalability and performance of each role.  This was a good session to use as a framework for all the other Exchange 2010 sessions.

After a very good lunch of salmon, pasta, salad and creme brule I was off to see Brett Shirley's (Microsoft) presentation, "Extensible Storage Engine (ESE) 'Database Cache'".  It was more of a level 5,000 session that made my brain hurt.  To say this was a deep dive is an understatement.  While the content was interesting, I probably should have bailed and gone to the Exchnage 2010 Backup & Recovery session.

Next was the Migration from Exchange 2003/2007 to Exchange 2010 session by Andrew Ehrensing (Microsoft).  This was a really well done presentation with tips learned by MCS on large deployments.  Really good content and demos here.

My last session was High Availability in Exchange Server 2010, presented by Scott Schnoll (Microsoft).  Scott covered all the high availability features of Exchange 2010 mailbox servers and DAGs.  He also gave us a sneak peak at Exchange Server 2010 SP1, due for public beta at TechEd 2010.

Well, that's it for now.  Gotta get ready for the Quest Reception Party in the Diamond Ballroom!