Well after somewhat of a disappointing start due to cutbacks (we got some sort of a laundry bag this year) and some very hungry vendors & partners in the exhibition hall (they ate the entire lunch of the pre conference delegates)* I’ve spend two very busy days at Tech Ed Europe.

* I should return the favor by getting a vast amount of high quality T-Shirts and other swag but I don’t have the time. I should outsource this but Azure is not yet offering a swag hunting as a service (SHAAS) in the cloud.

First of all I did a lot of sessions on Lync, SCVMM vNext, High Availability, Virtualization, Exchange, …. and in between I had some very informational discussions with storage vendors (I still have some to go) and apart from the technical info it’s fun to see how they deal with critical customer feedback or doubts.

Another fun part was running into twitter and blog acquaintances. Pretty cool people in the IT world. Helpful, easy going, very knowledgeable and fun guys and gals.

The TLC (Technical Learning Center) was staffed very well with a bunch of experts, both MVP’s, partners and Microsoft personnel. I had very engaging and motivating talks with lots of them.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager vNext is looking very promising. But beyond the publicly available information I’m under NDA.

I do think they should watch the quality levels of their sessions. Either we need more 400 level session or we need to deal with the inflation going on. The 400 seems to be new 300 sometimes. another option would be introducing 500 level sessions

This post will be posted with some delay as I have no internet where I’m writing this