It’s still Sunday and I’ve wandered into the not-yet-open exhibition hall.  I’ve a briefing in here in 45 minutes so it’s fine – I guess!

It’s quite flash looking in here.  You must walk pas the “The NEW Efficiency Zone”.  That appears to features lots of tech like Windows 7, Server 2008 R2 and Exchange 2010.  It is surrounded by System Center booths.  I can’t call them booths because they look way too flash.  There’s lots of “chrome” on gloss black.  Further into the hall are the more typical ask-the-experts stands.  If there are 3rd party stands here then they are way at the back.

The motto for the event appears to be “Efficiency”.  There’s lots of banners as you go up the entrance escalators featuring the above products and HP.  Strange how it isn’t IBM, eh?  LOL!  Who’d associate efficiency with IBM!!!

Exchange 2010 and the Office products obviously are playing a big role this week.  Exchange 2010 is being launched tomorrow in the keynote which is actually at the end of the day for a change.  There’s also a big push on SQL 2008 R2.  There’s a 2.5 hour session every day on installing it.  I guess it must be pre-booked or something but I’ll miss it due to my work schedule anyway.

I plan on going to Rhonda Layfield’s morning session on deployment troubleshooting and playing it by ear.  I’ll be going to some of the virtualisation stuff to see what’s happening.  It’s rare (even as a virtualisation MVP) that we get to hear directly from the MS team members.  There’s also some sessions on new features of Configuration Manager 2007 SP2 and 2007 R2, not to mention some V.Next stuff.  I was privvy to some of that info as a ConfigMgr MVP but it’s been a year since I could find time to attend their monthly briefings.  So I want to catch up.  I’ll obviously be dropping into one or two of Mark Minasi’s sessions to say “hi” to him.  Mark is doing 5 sessions in 2 days before flying to WinConnections in Las Vegas on Wednesday so he’ll be a busy man trying to prepare.

I thought strongly about signing up for Speaker Idol this year.  I had a topic that I though was cool.  But time was my enemy as usual.  Things just fell into place too late.  Anyway, that gives me a year to prepare for next year.  I have my demo environment (demo in a 3 minute presentation, YES!) and my topic.  TechEd 2010, watch out!

So I am waiting outside theatre 2 in TLC (The Learning Centre – maybe the exhibitors are elsewhere) for my briefing in 30 minutes.  There’s one or two others hanging about.  There’s no wifi in this room so I’ll be posting this later when I get a chance.

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Added in the hotel 3 hours later …. We had the briefing where we were reminded that we are all effectively the face of MS this week.  We all got MS staff office shirts (in royal blue).  We were told about the layout of the venue.  The “learning centre” with all the MS stuff is in a different hall to the 3rd party exhibitors.  In fact, you have to pass them and the open comms room to even get to the very distant conference rooms.  I hung around afterwards and chatted to Irish fellow MVP (Clustering), Edwin Van Mierlo.  It’s an early night for me tonight.  I’ve got CNN International and BBC World News to put me asleep.  More tomorrow.