Tech Ed 2008 EMEA IT - Day 5 and home time

I’ve been a bit delayed writing this final blog post from Tech Ed EMEA 2008, so I’m back in the UK. The final day at Tech Ed 2008 EMEA IT was not quite as session filled as previous days, mainly because Rik and I had to be heading off to the airport shortly before 3pm to catch our flight home.

The first presentation of the day was on getting the most out of WSUS 3.0 SP1. One of the items that was mentioned was the arrival of WSUS 3.0 SP2; this is currently in the planning phase and aims to fix the top customer and partner issues seen. It will also install on Windows Server 2008 R2. A number of scenarios for WSUS were discussed, including larger numbers of clients, branch offices and disconnected clients (submarines being the example used!) and some best practices discussed. If the video of this talk is available (at the time of writing, it isn’t unfortunately) and you use WSUS, I’d recommend watching it.

The second (and last) talk of the day I went to discussed Exchange 2007 SP1 and Hyper-V. The good news is that Exchange 2007 SP1 is fully supported on any of the x64 hypervisors validated by Microsoft on Windows Server 2008. If you want to virtualise your Exchange 2003 installation, you’ll need to use Virtual Server 2005; note that Exchange 2003 is explicitly not supported on Hyper-V.

Following these talks Rik and I spent some time talking to more of the experts in the ask the experts pavilion and got some answers to some long-standing questions.

Our flight home was uneventful, but it seemed rather cold when we stepped out of the plane at Manchester after the week in Barcelona!