Teched 2006

This year’s edition of Teched has gone a mayor change. Teched have been merged with IT-Forum which means we now have 2 editions of Teched, one for the developers and one for Infrastructure.

For me this makes Teched even more a place to be. This year’s edition was held in beautiful Barcelona and was sold out very early. This is not so strange as this year Microsoft brings out a plethora of new Infrastructure software beginning with Windows Vista. About 4700 guests (or delegates as MS says) attended.

Vista has gone RTM last week for businesses and looks and feels great. There’s one dark cloud hanging over Vista and that is licensing. Vista users are required to activate, even in the corporate licensing models. Read the FAQ here: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsvista/plan/faq.mspx

Corporate licensing is not available for server versions but will be 1^st quarter next year. Until then a Vista Workstation can be used

Office 2007 is out too. Office has gone astray from the previous file format which has been used ever since Office 97. Now Office uses an XML formatted file format which makes it easier for the different programs in Office to cooperate. The look and feel changed dramatically and it takes getting used to. Microsoft Groove was also released. If you never heard of it, Groove is a mini sharepoint for workgroups. It allows users from different domains to cooperate in a sharepoint like environment.

Sharepoint 2007 is now out too. Sharepoint is not my thing but this version supposes to be better. This is about time I say.

There where also a few talks about Terminal Services in Longhorn. This preview of things to come was very interesting. Microsoft again sets the bar higher for TS. There is an equivalent for Citrix Secure Gateway which translates outside HTTPS to RDP inside. This gateway does not need to be on the same domain to function but it makes it does make it easier for the users because it supports single sign on if the gateway is a member. Overall Longhorn should carry more users then Windows 2003 on the same hardware because of changes in profile load and unload.

We get to see the future of Systems Management Server, but I wasn’t exited very much. Except some minor changes like added drag and drop functionality I did not see many improvements. But MS promised to add more features, maybe even add softgrid integration.

All in all it was very interesting and worthwhile.

If you have any questions please feel free to contact me by E-mail: