NSV

I have noticed that mid afternoon is when the Mars snackfood comes out, rest assured I am eating as much of it as I can and even taking some away in case I get hungry later! If I were in the Great Escape I would be the 'Scrounger'!

No doubt there will be a spike in Las Vegas net sales volume this week due to my gluttony ;-)

I'm a bit behind with my posts due to spending an hour or so working our why I was going to appear on the bad boy SFAR exception list and making sure I did not. We have the Closing Party tonight and are just about to meet the NYC Metro Area account team from Microsoft so I'll try to catch the posts up tomorrow morning, so mid afternoon UK time.

Poll Added!

On the right hand side below the Tag Cloud. We'd like to know if you have been reading and if it has been useful. From my perspective I have probably retained a lot more information by taking notes and then writing them up and having the opportunity to think about what has been said.

I was hoping people would comment, perhaps with questions that we could have found out for you. It could be we are providing all the right information for you anyway?

If it has worked, then maybe as different people go to event they can do the same and help keep everyone involved.

Is anyone there?

It's our last day tomorrow, so last chance for you guys to have us field any of your questions with the experts here.

I'd also like to take the opportunity to solicit feedback on our blogging experiment but as Mat is uber-blogging admin I'll leave it to him to add the polling thingy.

How do they do that?

An interesting session for a couple of reasons. First, hearing about how exisiting customers are working around product limitations is a great way to find out the 'real' product limitations. Second, there was a discussion about 'best practice' application packaging and deployment which is as relevant to our current environment as it is to Microsoft System Center customers.

The slides are pretty good so I won't go into too much detail here, but some things we should think about are Desired Configuration Management (DCM) and a consistent hardware decommissioning process. Our process and organisation actually map fairly well to best practice with the noticeable exception of our insistence on 'bundling' the applications into monolithic updates, but it seems to me this stems from a lack of automation at the site end, so we should carefully consider what can be done to reduce the burden on our local infrastructure teams.

Where's the Party?

We were supposed to go to the Microsoft event on Tuesday night - we had tickets and everything, only to get to the venue and get told that the venue was 'at capacity'. Seems a bit odd to go to the trouble of ticketing an event and then distributing too many tickets, but what can you do?

What we did is to find a bar (can you guess which drink is Mat's?) and watch the world go by. We were assured that the bowl of suspicious looking green/white things were wasabi, but we chose to play it safe and order chunks of cow instead :-)

Last night we finally found a casino that had cheap enough tables for us to have a go at BlackJack (the thought of losing $50 a hand in the mainstream casinos was bit off-putting), and we spent an enjoyable couple of hours losing a few bucks, then winning it all back just to lose it some more. Overall we finished up, but there are plenty more days to go!

Third Keynote

So this morning's keynote was billed as "Reality of the Cloud", which was all about Microsoft's datacenters. You start to understand the scale of their datacenter operation really when they talk about 'piloting' a technology on 1,000 servers, and growth doubling from 10,000 to 20,000 server installations per month. The speaker was refreshingly honest and talked about recently starting to use the latest MS products to manage their environment as previous versions just didn't cut it.

It was also interesting to see the term 'Operation Excellence' in use, as well as her departmental key drivers being very similar to some of our principles (growth, efficiency and trust). I'm not sure MS are big on mutuality just yet though! Probably the most interesting thing she talked about was the impact on MS when acquiring companies, as they are often open-source, niche technology companies that are highly heterogenous. This has directly led to the interoperability features in the recent products.

In short an engaging keynote that drove home the scalability of the MS management products and an insight into the infrastructure that sits behind the scenes of services like hotmail and MSN.

Enterprise Desktop Virtualisation

This session was all about the "sixth" piece of MDOP. The Kidaro acquisition is not due to complete until May, so there are no release dates yet. They also confirmed that the pricing of MDOP will not change when this component is added in, always a surprise from Microsoft!

So onto the product itself, which is fairly clever. At a high level, it is basically a 'hidden' virtual PC installation running windows XP or Vista. Applications that are 'published' from the hidden virtual OS are presented seamlessly on the user's host PC. This could potentially be used to deliver an SDS XP experience on a non-standard workstation (e.g. contractor laptop). It's also the technology that was used to run the USB demo at the end of the keynote that Mat has already mentioned.

The product adds usability to the Virtual PC application in a number of ways. Firstly, the virtual machine is hidden, so the user experience is seamless. Updates to the VM image can be done on the fly, and the update mechanism promises to be very light on bandwidth as the agent checks if any of the updated components already exist on the host machine and only transfers the differences.

While it is very cool technology, I have to wonder about the horsepower required on the desktop to run this acceptably, and there are still a bunch of unanswered questions on how licensing will work.

We should definitely watch this space!