Things have been quiet here for a couple of days whilst we were at IPExpo and interesting conference with a tangential subject line up but one that creates great conversations. I know the talk was great ‘cos I’m drinking lemon tea to help ease my throat…where are my herbal sweets? We had some great conversations around Windows Phone 7, Azure and around BPOS and Office 365, around System Center, Virtualisation, Desktop Deployment, Percy pigs, Windows Intune, Lync, Web Standards, IE9 and all sorts. Basically it was ace.
I got asked some superb questions over the course of the two days and now that I’m back in the office I’ll be buying lots of people coffee to find out the answers to publish here, things like:
- How do I connect BPOS / Office 365 to my AD?
- What kinds of hardware does Lync need to connect to phone systems?
- What is Windows Azure and SQL Azure and how does Windows Azure and SQL Azure work?
- Hyper-V, is it enterprise ready?
- Hyper-V, can I live migrate Virtual Machines?
- What does Microsoft use? What does our IT look like?
- Application streaming, what’s that, when and why would I use it?
- How secure is my data in the cloud?
- Cloud, is it really the future?
And so many more that I can’t currently remember them. I also had Windows Phone 7 with me (as did @deepfat) and gave people some little demos. Things like being able to link your contacts, so if you know someone on Facebook, Windows Live and have them in your Exchange inbox then that can become one contact. Folks wanted a good look at the Market place so I showed them some of the apps from Tesco and Seesmic the Channel 9 app, oh and the Ebay app and the Bing Maps app. They also loved the metro interface and smooth transitions and navigation. I used it as a phone, apparently it does that too! 
Matt McSpirit (aka Virtual boy aka @mattmcspirit) and I presented on Windows Intune, BPOS and SQL Azure and you’ll find the slides embedded below – courtesy of Office Web Apps. We’re going to re-run the session and record it and get the video out there. Other highlights were meeting and talking to Zane Adam, who knows lots about SQL Azure and doing a round table with him before the show and some folks we invited along got to ask questions so we’ll have those vids online soon.
Next on the horizon is the Springboard tour, I can’t wait for that where we’ll be talking about the awesomeness of Windows 7 deployment and following that I’ll be at TechEd Europe where you’ll find me on the TechNet stand and squatting in presentations around the joint…can’t wait.
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