As I posted earlier, Honolulu happened to be graced with a TS2 seminar 2 days ago. It’s about time!
Woody Walton was the presenter for the topics that included Managed Services, System Center Essentials, Exchange 2007/Communicator/etc. and Forefront line of products. He did an excellent job of getting the pertinent information out to the attendees.
He demo’d System Center Essential 2007 for us, and although I have it in my Action Pack, I haven’t had the chance to install it and play with it yet. The demo got me drooling however, so that may be on the list to do once I finish an office move for one of my clients.
The majority of the Forefront presentation was on the Client Security offering. Since I’ve been using it in the home office, I had a good working knowledge of it already, and managed to net me a SBS 2003 neoprene CD holder for answering the only question presented to us. I r smart. He did let us know that the next line of Forefront products being developed are under the code name "Stirling", for those fascinated by code names.
He also gave us a live demo of the automated voice attendant used to access his e-mail, calendar, voicemail, etc. back in Redmond. I had only read about the feature so seeing it in action was pretty impressive. He did run into some problems with it recognizing his voice input since he was using speaker phone, but I got the gist of the usefulness of the offering. He also ran a video of a "Devil wears Prada" spoof demonstrating the power of the complete offering. Great display of the possible uses of the technology, and funny to boot. The Roundtable hardware looked very cool for those that teleconference with multiple people present in 1 room. Availability is very limited for the Roundtable device though.
Also covered were various VOIP phones, including the Catalina USB Phone and a phone with Communicator embedded, which traverses firewalls. He stated he has a co-worker that’s taken the phone overseas, plugged it into the hotel internet, and was then able to access his information back at the office. Very cool technology.
During our 1 break, I made it down to introduce myself and see if he recognized the Blue Monster, which I use on my business card. He hadn’t, so I explained to him the basics and gave him the info to find more on it. He was very intrigued, to say the least and said he’d definitely get more info on the little guy. I also made him aware that "Centro" had been given a name that morning, which he wasn’t aware of at the time. He probably wished I hadn’t told him, as he referred to it by the full name the rest of the seminar instead of "Centro" (luckily, he had covered what he needed of "Centro" before the break, so it wasn’t much). Sorry!
All in all, a great experience start to finish. Some of the attendees (Microsoft Partners) were making snide remarks and chuckles as he covered some of the material, so I can see now where Vlad gets his "riff-raff" from. A minor annoyance, but nothing that detracted from the entire experience.
On the way out, I talked with one of the guys that sat at the table (didn’t get the name as they were packing it up) and he said TS2 had plans to make it out at least twice a year now. Good news considering they hadn’t been out since I became a Partner over a year ago.
Here’s to seeing more events in Hawaii!
I have another post coming soon covering something I found very interesting in the IT market here in Hawaii. Surprised the hell out of me, for sure.
Tags: Microsoft TS2 Exchange 2007 Communications Server Communicator Forefront Managed Services Action Pack Stirling SBS 2003 VOIP RoundTable Catalina Centro Business Essentials Server Blue Monster Honolulu Hawaii System Center Essential
