Well, life is full of good intentions and my good intention was to blog from IT Forum. So, as usual I didn’t. And I have all sorts of excuses – not least of which was the stellar rate at which the wireless networking kept failing – Andrew Cheesman get your Tu-Tu out. That and total information overload of my brain.
We started the week with a pre-conference session on “What’s new in Server 2003 R2” – I didn’t think there would be enough to occupy the full six hours scheduled – oh boy was I wrong! OK we had coffee breaks but even so… Lots of new stuff including Active Directory Federation, Remote Differential Compression – only saving the changes in a file during replication, quotas including document size and type screening, print management, control, and quotas, the ability to monitor hardware whilst the OS is running and during pre-boot and post-crash (it does this by talking to the BMC - Baseboard Management Controller)… Lots, lots more…
The Keynote on Tuesday was based very much around Server 2003 R2, Virtual Server 2005 (including clustering) and Office 12.
I then went to a session on Office 12 Servers (or SharePoint as we know it…) Now I knew that MS were putting a lot of effort into SP but I hadn’t realised quite how much. So, it’s been enhanced to provide intranet, extranet and internet sites. I hope I’m getting all this right as I was typing at a rate of knots – support built in for blogs and wikis out of the box, archive site for email, server based InfoPath forms, CMS and scaleable content store, major/minor versioning is back, Excel services – share a spreadsheet via a zero-footprint browser display, a 2-stage recycle bin for administrators, document and list trimming based on security access controls, enforceable document checkout – the list goes on, and on.
Anyway – suffice to say that I’ve come back buzzing with all sorts of ideas for the server farm I’m going to set up, with duplicate blade-server systems running multiple Virtual Server Clusters with automatic failover, storage on iSCSI devices and all fronted by an ISA server…
Now all I need is the national budget of a small country…
Now, the strangest thing – whoever put the following two facilities close together obviously had a sense of humour…
The only way to stay alert and on-top of things was lots of caffeine and the occasional sugar rush – this was provided for me on Wednesday by freshly made waffles smothered in chocolate sauce – these had the calorific value of a small planet…
Many thanks to Clara, the Australian waitress in the Irish Bar, for keeping us under control despite everything… OK – we weren’t that bad…
The UK Academic event on Wednesday evening was good – held in a tapas restaurant, my favourite sort of eating – bits of everything, I even managed to get back to my hotel in the same day as I left it!
Took a few hours out of the last afternoon to go and visit Parc Guell as the last twice I’ve been to Barcelona I’ve not managed to get there. I took a few pictures some of which are below. Parc Guell was built in the early part of the 20th Century, it was planned to be a garden city, but only two house were ever built.
It was a long way up, thank goodness they provided travelators...
But the view was well worth it, the Torre Agbar is to the left with the Sagrada Familia to the right.
And you can't get away without a picture of the 'signature' Gaudi lizard.
All in all a fantastic week – all I have to do now is write a report up…