Tech-Ed Berlin 2009: Day 5, Friday 13th of November

Phew. I was invited by a company for dinner. Also many OpsMgr MVP’s were there and it got a bit late. Afterwards we went to Club Felix in Berlin which made it even more late. So I skipped the first session since my ‘system’ wasn’t up to it. :)

Fingerprint or poor password?
This session was all about the new/enhanced security features in Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7. The speaker was Rafal Lukawiecki, and he knows it all inside and out. On top of it, he has a very good way of presenting it so it was fun listening to him.

His session was divided in three parts. The first part was ‘generic’ about the security framework and –model. The second part was all about the security related to Windows Server 2008 R2 and the last part was about Windows 7. A good session it was and very interesting.

Troubleshooting, explained by The King Himself
It was hard to choose. Either to see Wally Mead in action about upgrading from SMS 2003 to SCCM (This man knows so much about SCCM. Back in Barcelona I attended an interactive session of him. A guy tried to outsmart him (duh!) and talked about the SDK. Wally said: ‘Don’t teach me on the SDK. I wrote it myself!’. The guy became very very silent….) or Mark Russinovich, the man behind SysInternals.

Finally I ended up in his session which was good as well. I have used Process Monitor, Process Explorer and other SysInternal tools many times in my days being a Systems Engineer. Now I finally saw the man behind it all. The way he uses that tooling is awesome. He had multiple cases from the real world which he demonstrated and the way they went about it in order to solve it. Very inspiring it was.

All good things come to an end
After that session it was finished. No more sessions left. Tech-Ed 2009 had come to an end. :( So it was time to take the shuttle to the airport and go back to Holland. As you can see I wasn’t the only one who had brought along his luggage:

Its really over…

Ready to go…

The five days at Tech-Ed were awesome. Attending Tech-Ed conferences is really something I can advise to every one working in the IT business. How else do you get the change to meet with the people behind all the software you/your company uses on a daily basis? Also THE change to meet with other IT Pro’s as well. Of course one can read a lot, check out the internet, but never ever will one get that close to the source itself. Also the advise, insight, tips & tricks one gets here is worth the effort and time. Of course there are tons of other reasons as well why to attend Tech-Ed.

Next week I will post an article which will summarize this whole awesome week. It won’t be about the sessions but about the road ahead, grouped per product.