Category Archives: Education

Microsoft Management Summit 2012

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From the 16th of April until the 20th of April 2012 Microsoft is running animportant conference for anyone who’s involved with systems management in the Microsoft sphere. It is, of cause, the Microsoft Management Summit 2012 (MMS 2012) in Las Vegas (Nevada, USA).

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This is a conference that is held in very high regard and I’ve heard through the grape vines it’s one of the favorite conferences for Microsoft Employees to attend themselves due to its high quality and focus on the System Center suite. I’ve never had the opportunity to attend before and I would like to go.

It’s very likely that the System Center 2012 Suite of products will be officially launched at MMS 2012 and there will be an abundance of learning opportunities in regards to these. As said above, I’d really love to go and I encourage anyone who can make it to attend. Yes, I know it’s in the United States, so for us non US residents that can mean long and expensive travel and we’ll need a budget to stay in Las Vegas for a week. But it’s the only conference of its kind. There is no MMS Europe and such. Although I have to say that with initiatives like “Best of MMS” TechNet events Microsoft & the community make an effort to deliver content and information to a much larger audience, which is great.

If you’re in the target group for this conference and you’re interested take a look here. They even have cost/benefit sheet to help convince your management Winking smile

Now a lot of you are already be playing with the System Center 2012 Betas and Release Candidates but if you’re not  you might want to get a head start by downloading the System Center 2012 Evaluation Products and perhaps even by joining the Community Evaluation Program for System Center 2012 (Private Cloud) and Configuration Manager 2012.

A Festive End Of 2011 & A Great 2012 To All

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Well the end of 2011 is getting closer and 2012 is about to knock at my door. 2011 was a very busy year and 2012 show no signs of being different, quite the opposite actually. We’re going to be deploying the System Center 2012 Suite, diving in to Windows 8 Server and I’m doing some storage projects in the  >200TB usable storage space range. Getting our feet wet with the private cloud concept in production etc. On top of that I’m planning to attend some conferences and might be speaking at some of those again on Hyper-V, Clustering, Storage and Windows 8 Server.

I’d like to thank all my readers and let you know I appreciate the feedback and your words of thanks when you’ve found my posts helpful or funny.

To all my IT buddies I’ve been lucky enough to have met up with in 2011 I hope to see you all again in 2012 for some more fun and educational conferences and dinners. There is a very helpful and smart bunch of people out there and I enjoy talking with them.

To those of you who are changing employers, jobs, starting your own companies or going freelance, I wish you all the best. It’s reassuring that in these day of constant economic doom & gloom we see people moving ahead full steam and with confidence.

I have a great small team of great IT Pros & Developers working with in the trenches and hope they continue to have fun and keep finding positive challenges in their jobs. They have “the right stuff” and we couldn’t get things done without their skillsets. The challenge for management is to help ‘m get the job done nothing more or less than that, to take away obstacles and let ‘m be the best they can be.

This year was also the first time I presented to a very stimulating, knowledgeable and communicative technical audience. There is room for improvement in my presenting skills but I enjoyed it and it was very good learning experience for me. It’s not easy to deliver good content, and share knowledge. I thank all of you who make an effort to do so and I wish you all a happy, prosperous, carefree and healthy 2012!

Dell Storage Forum Europe 2012

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If you’re into storage and a happy DELL customer / user like me you might very well want to check out the DELL Storage Forum2012 in London (January 9-12). Don’t wait too long however as time is running out. Compellent has some impressive features and conditions (licensing, modularity, easy of use, PowerShell support, Live Motion & federation, Hyper-V support, Snapshots) that I’m very interested in. It’s those abilities that make a SAN worth it’s money in 2012 and beyond, that combined with a way to get out of the forklift upgrade cycle of storage.

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Storage vendors have a lot of competition going on and are under a lot of pressure from customers to provide better value for money due to operational costs, complex licensing and fork lift upgrades, expensive upgrades and sometime lack luster support. Those vendors that can address these concerns best will be in a good spot when they face competition, not only from the storage vendors but also from software SAN producers and Microsoft with Windows 8 Server. I think Compellent is a viable candidate in this space and I’ll be checking them out extensively. Data growth is a huge issue and affordable storage needs are a big concern for most companies. Vendors know that and I hope they compete on offering better & more affordable solutions rather than banking on the fact customers need them that much they won’t need to change their business too much.

TechDays 2012: 80% of agenda online and 1 more week to benefit from 15% discount

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Just 1 more week to benefit from a 15% discount on your ticket for TechDays 2012: the Early Bird pricing ends on December 21. Registrations are coming in strong, so be sure to secure your spot before we sell out!


Top Speakers

Developer Track
Alex Turner
Brian Keller
Jeff Prosise
IT Pro Track
Corey Hynes
John Craddock
Adam Hall

We are happy to confirm speakers like:

– In the Developer track: Alex Turner, Brian Keller, Bart De Smet, Gill Cleeren, Jeff Prosise, Maarten Balliauw, Matt Milner, Ben Riga, Steve Sanderson, Nikhil Kothari, Rob Miles, Tarek Madkour, Wade Wegner

– In the IT Pro track: John Craddock, Kurt Roggen, Ilse Van Criekinge, Adam Hall, Corey Hynes, Kim Oppalfens, Mike Resseler, Dan Holme 

International speakers are teamed up with our local experts to give you a top content mix.

TechDays program: 80% of agenda is finalized

This year promises to bring a lot of new content from Microsoft. Looking at the next versions of tooling, languages, OS and management you know this is not a standard TechDays event. Our content is split into current and upcoming technology.

Deep Dives (February 16)

Peter Himschoot and Jurgen Postelmans (U2U) will be delivering a full day .NET 4.5 and Visual Studio (Dev11) Futures for Web Development Deep Dive covering all the latest and greatest in .NET 4.5, focusing on Web Development with ASP.NET, HTML5 and WCF.

Rhonda Layfield will be delivering a full day deep dive covering all the different tools and techniques to deploy Windows 7, she will also cover the upcoming Windows OS deployment tools.

Mike Resseler & Tom Shinder will deliver a full day covering private cloud topics, including Management and Operations of your private cloud infrastructure.

About TechDays 2012

Join our 10th anniversary edition in a new location (Kinepolis Imagibraine – Braine l’Alleud) and learn about:
• Windows & Internet Explorer
• Windows Server 8 & Hyper-V
• Windows Phone 7 development
• System Center 2012 & Windows Intune
• Tooling and languages with Visual Studio, C# and VB Futures
• Next generation apps
• Cloud development with Windows Azure Platform
• Web development with HTML5, JavaScript and ASP.NET
• …

> REGISTER NOW

Hope to see you at the TechDays 2012!

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