(Well, I looked at the slides for the AD Tips and Tricks session, and I think I had seen most of the presentation before, so I skipped out to the hotel and caught a quick nap.)

The attendee party was at Sea World, got to see Shamu drench a bunch of people, saw some sharks up close and ate way too much food, drank too much beer. It’s a pretty big place so it didn’t seem nearly as crowded as some of the previous attendee parties.

Now, it’s Friday morning, I’m sitting in a session about Practical Security Lockdown Techniques and I’m wearing my Official Red Hat Mirror t-shirt. I figure if I get thrown out, all I’ve missed is Friday. I figure this might generate some dialog with other attendees….

Well, Visual Studio 2005 Team System is going to include a bug system like BugZilla, source control that sounds damn nifty, some really cool rules inforcement on checkin, reporting out the wazoo, build automation and a SharePoint based site for each project. And all this will be tied together inside the IDE.
Big note about source control: It’s going to be much more stable for remote developers.

I can see some of the reporting features actually being useful in a smaller environment, but I’m betting the licensing costs and hassle of setting it up will negate any benefits you might see. But, who knows, the academic/Select contract might get it for a song, like everything else. Managers are going to be clamoring for the reports and if they are knowledgable enough to get at it, the raw data as well. I’m actually very interested in seeing the backend database design and the prospects of writing a more portable interface.

And, not to be left out, Visual Source Safe is getting revved again, to VSS 2005. Supposedly many of the major complaints about it have been addressed and it will continue to be the recommended tool for smaller shops.

Next up: AD Tips and Tricks

So, the current slot has nothing I’m interested in. So, I’m spending the time catching up on CommNet and doing some TechEdbloggers reading. One interesting entry actually sounds like there is someone out there that LIKES Visual Source Safe. I’m guessing he’s using it in a small environment, like 1 or 2 devs, or doesn’t have to use it over a slow link. I don’t have to do either of those things, but I’ve heard the complaints of others about them. And, fittingly, the next session I’m headed to is about VS 2005 Team System Source Code Control. And again, if I could just convince the developers to use it, I’d be miles ahead.

So, I went to the Exchange for Midsize businesses session thinking we just might fit in that category and I wasn’t wrong: anything over ~75 and under 1000 mailboxes is what they call midsize. Most of what was in the session was a re-hash of previous sessions: spam blocking with IMF, Exchange 2003 SP1, explanations of how RPC over HTTPS needs just about everything to be very modern, cache mode for Outlook 2003, etc. A couple of things I noticed: The IMF installer doesn’t look very polished, it pops several NET.EXE windows (probably starting services) towards the end. Not a big deal, but why do something so kludgy?

At lunch I sat with a couple people from Nebraska, a lady from Des Moines and a lady from Italy. The lady from Italy said that it was considerably cheaper for her to fly half way around the world to TechEd than to attend one of the shorter TechEds in Europe. Nice comment on the shrinking value of the dollar.

The Local Installation Source (LIS) seems to be the way Office is headed. It’s still using the Custom Install Wizard and Transforms to install, so its not a major change in that area, only in where the files come from. Patching is also a bit of a change, since you have to start using the client patches and OHOTFIX.EXE on the client, not patching the install source like you do with an admin share. MSI takes care of keeping the correct version of files if/when you need to do a repair , using its database of hotfixes/file versions.

There is also a tool coming in the near future to manage the LIS without calling the full setup.exe, which seems like a good idea.

I’m still thinking LIS is probably not the best method for our well connected lab environment, but I’ll probably just have to try it to find out for sure. The setup looks pretty easy.

So, I went to the BoF thing last night on small IT shops and how we keep current. Nobody had any really earth shattering suggestions, other than if you are in any way eligible for any of the Microsoft Partner programs, definitly sign up.
One of the other people in the session happened to mention that he was ‘just down the road’ from U of I and sometimes got interns from there. That peaked my interest and I had to stop him on the way out and talk to him. Turns out he had sent me a meeting invite via Rio just a few minutes before the session. Randomness strikes again. He works for KruppGerlach in Danville, but the similarities don’t end there. We went out for a couple beers at the Top of the Hyatt bar afterwards. He was in the Air Force and stationed at Langley about the the same time I lived there, he knows a couple people that I know at DACC, he’s been a driver in the Sweetcorn Festival Demo Derby (in a V-8 Monza in the Bumblebee class), etc.

So, we flew more than halfway across the country to run into each other.

It looks like Exchange finally got the features that SpamAssassin, Amavis/amavisd-new and Postfix have had for some time: connection blocking by IP, RBL support, spam ‘scoring’, multi-level actions on spam, reject messages for invaild recipients, etc. The recommended email infrastructure even looks like what most people running Exchange have now with a bridgehead doing tagging/blocking. The main thing is you could now switch to having Exchange out there, if you so choose.

There’s a fairly interesting Birds of a Feather session at 7pm on small IT shops, might head on down there.

It’s on the plate (along with about a billion other things, just like everyone else in this business), figure I might as well get some guidance.
And I was not disappointed in the least, lots of nifty features type things, but no real demos, that comes tommorrow. Local Installation Source (LIS) is now the reccommended way of installing, unless you have a good reason not to, which I think our computer labs have. The Profile Wizard is supposed to be able to make outlook profiles now, though I wonder how well that works when you have something installing the applications in another user context in the background. Patch managment (as usual) was also mentioned, with the contrast in LIS vs Admin install point being the major focus. OHOTFIX.EXE from the client install patches is the favored way to install, if you are using LIS, otherwise its the same old story of patch the admin share and reinstall on the client. Another nifty thing is chaining of installs directly in setup.ini, sounds useful for the lab installs where we have lots of duplicate machines that need exactly the same thing, but not so useful for admin machines where we need Frontpage here, Word there, Project here, etc.

Now for lunch and a session on either SQL 2005 Deployment or Group Policy Best Practices. It’s pretty much a coin toss at this point.

I’m also looking around at the chances for a Harbor Tour with Hornblower Tours, might skip out on the last session today and try to get there. Theres also the chance that both sessions will suck and I’ll head up there earlier than that.

Lets start with the best quote: “We’re not even sure it’s still going to be called DTS.” That pretty much represents how much things have changed. There’s a new development environment (as yet unnamed) with different panes for work flow and data flow (how novel). There is now flow control (for, foreach, etc loops), security on packages is role based and built in error flow on most transforms: if it succeeds, it goes out the green arrow, if failed the red one. There’s an advanced session tommorrow, but I think I’m going to another session at that time. Next up: snacks and Planning your Office 2003 Deployment.