It’s been a couple of days ago already, but I did not want to withhold the info.

I’ve been a bit busy (holiday/work/family) lately so my posts were not that regularly as before. I do try to keep up the pace a little now. So first some catching up to do.

It started on the (very early) morning of the 18th of june 2007. I got in my car at 06:00 AM in the morning heading to a meeting point (MCDrive) where I picked up a collegue of mine. At 08:45 we arrived in Amsterdam after enjoying(not) the typical trafic jam.

This was the first edition of an annual Technet Live event ever (that is in The Netherlands) and it replaces the regional "Technet Meetings". This event was crowded.

Nice to see that there were a lot of people I met before, even some customers I worked with.

Roughly spoken there were two types of sessions you could attend. The type of sessions depended on the money factor… in concreto: You either paid for it or not. Luckily the event fee for the payable content was on another level compared to Tech Ed IT Forum. You even were offered to pick a book title.

A lot of sessions were offered which I am not listing here, their probably somewhere on the web, as I am thinking of it, I’m sure they are because I got a mail with a link to all the slides, some of them in Dutch and some in English.

After listening to the Keynote –  mainly about exchange 2007 and collaboration and of course the stunning Microsoft Round Table Device (a new teleconferencing camera/mic device which follows the direction of sound in order to provide voice and video) – I  enjoyed the session of Mark Minasi most, maybe not entirely based on the contents but surely based on his presentation skills, boy he was really funny.

While you’re reading this you’re probably wondering what about the virtual aspect then?

I also enjoyed two sessions concerning virtualization. The first one I attended was a so called sponsor session during the lunch break. In this case the sponsor was… VMware. It was a nice one, a pity he did it in English because his dutch accent was embarrasing at some point, but anyway it was a nice overview of VMware’s capabilities. The exact word to describe this session should be ‘couragious’ (operating behind enemy lines). Another teaser was the VMware booth: they were showing off a Nintendo WII.

The other session I attended was a session about windows virtualization ( to be released 180 days after the RTM of Windows Server 2008). This was a very nice session hosted by Ronald Beekelaar MVP. This was the second time I attended a session from him and it was a very nice session. Not too much news though. The glimpse of Virtual Machine Manager used with windows virtualization, was funny because the version showed was a pre-beta version which contained a funny description of VLAN tagging "Does Something". It just shows that vlans are new to Microsoft (at least for some people). For the rest of the session details see the slides.