Fire Side Chats

When the leaner, faster, 64-bit Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 premiered at the 2009 TechEd conference it was, in the words of one analyst, “a jaw dropping experience”.  During this chat, we will talk about the huge enhancements to Windows Server 2008 R2 such as:  client and server virtualization with Microsoft Hyper-V; improved Hyper-V support, presentation virtualization with RDS; integrated document lifecycle management abilities in file services (FCI); support for live migration of virtual servers; better together technologies with Microsoft Windows 7 client - DirectAccess and BranchCache;; support for .NET on the Server Core; support for 256 logical processors;– and much, much more.
Ward Ralston is Group Program Manager in the Windows Server Group. Ward has worked in the computer industry for over 15 years, and has obtained multiple certifications, including: CCNA, Security+, MCSA+S, MCSE (NT4, W2K, WS03), MCT, and CISSP. Ward is a veteran of the U. S. Navy Submarine Service. He frequently blogs on the Windows Server Division Weblog at http://blogs.technet.com/windowsserver.
Vineet Thuvara is the Worldwide Window Server Launch lead. He has worked in the computer industry for over 10 years and is a graduate of MIT and Harvard.
Amongst other things, Ward and Vineet are responsible for Worldwide Field and IPM Technical Readiness. They work with key teams, developers, and architects within Microsoft to provide principal technical readiness content

Virtualization is one of the hot topics that every organization can benefit from. From Optimizing the Desktop, through Server Virtualization, and out to the Cloud, Virtualization has allowed IT Organizations to respond more quickly to their customers' needs while becoming more efficient and saving money. During this chat, we will talk about Microsoft's Virtualization Strategy, the advancements with Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and VMM 2008 R2 and how they help an organization decrease costs and increase flexibility in the datacenter, server room, branch offices, or wherever.
 
Kenon Owens is a Technical Product Manager on the Integrated Virtualization Team  where he works on Microsoft’s Virtualization Products (across the portfolio) and solutions (enabled by MS products and the partner ecosystem).  His responsibilities include core content development, demo development, integration with the outbound/campaign teams on messaging/positioning, technical presentations at internal/external events, and support of field selling process as technical subject-matter expert. Kenon Owens has worked in the computer industry for over 15 years as an email and virtualization specialist. Kenon has worked for other Industry Virtualization Leaders for over 9 years as a Staff Systems Engineer specializing in industry research and competitive analysis. In this role, Kenon worked with Executives and R&D to track the virtualization landscape for industry trends, new technologies, and product direction. Prior to this, Kenon worked with numerous customers developing and delivering successful Virtualization Infrastructure implementations. Kenon holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and Marine Engineering Technology.

Software-plus-Services is the next logical step in the evolution of computing.  It represents an industry shift toward software design that is neither exclusively PC nor browser-centric and blends traditional client-server architecture with cloud-based software delivery. Microsoft Online Services is at the center of that evolution, delivering communication and collaboration software services, hosted and managed by Microsoft.
              
Join Bharat Shah, General Manager of Engineering for Microsoft Online Services, for a fireside chat with the Microsoft Insiders. Bharat leads the engineering teams that are delivering the Business Productivity Online Suite, which includes Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Communications Online, and Live Meeting. Bharat will take your questions and talk about how Microsoft engineering is tackling the challenges of delivering highly available, enterprise software services for organizations around the world and how cloud computing and software-plus-services is changing the way Microsoft thinks about software.

Moving to Windows7? Learn how Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010 can make your job easier. 
This Solution Accelerator is the recommended process and toolset for automating desktop and server deployment. 
Learn more about  installation, image creation, and deployment scenarios for using MDT. Senior Software Development Engineer Michael Niehaus will be leading this session and he’ll answer any questions you may have.
Michael is the lead developer for the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit. Prior to joining Microsoft in 2004, Michael spent his entire career in enterprise IT, focused on deploying and managing Microsoft software.

SharePoint 2010 has just come out in public beta and there are many new features for Developers. There are new tools in Visual Studio and SharePoint Designer, new capabilities for developer workstations, many  new features in the SharePoint platform, new deployment opportunities for SharePoint applications and a new focus on SharePoint as an application development platform. In this discussion we will spin through the 20 top new features in SharePoint 2010 for developers in 15 minutes and then take questions from the audience. For links to where Microsoft has published full details of the new features see http://blogs.msdn.com/pandrew.
Paul Andrew is a Technical Product Manager on the SharePoint team at Microsoft. He has also worked at Microsoft as a Developer Evangelist and as a Developer Consultant in Microsoft Consulting Services. Before Microsoft Paul worked as a development team lead at an independent software vendor building embedded software for access control and alarms systems.”

Let's talk about what's new in Office 2010, specifically about implications for IT Pro's.  Topics to include security improvements, Backstage capabilities, hardware requirements, how to host the Web Apps, improvements to application compatibility testing, tips/tools to get your end users prepared, and much more.  Reed Shaffner is a Technical Product Manager for the Office client, with a focus on IT Professionals.  He is a frequent and very popular speaker at major industry events and at corporate executive briefings.

Office 2010 and related products, particularly SharePoint, offer a lot of compelling new features for users. But, there is a lot of new leverage for developers to customize Office and tailor it to the needs of a individuals, departments, and whole organizations. Learn what is new in Office 2010 for developers and discover what's in the content pipeline that you can use to get up to speed on the new technologies.
 
John R. Durant is a Senior Product Manager in the Office group driving Office developer marketing. Previously, he worked on the engineering team for Visual Studio and before that managed the MSDN site for Office developers. Prior to joining Microsoft he worked as a consultant architecting large scale software solutions for Fortunate 500 and mid-sized companies. He drawns on a dozen years of Office Developer-related experience to frequently write and speak on topics pertaining to Office productivity solutions, .NET, and other Microsoft products and technologies.

SharePoint 2010 brings many new capabilities to enterprise customers. It also means SharePoint administrators need to learn more.  Join IT Professional experience discussion to learn more about new IT Pro features and improvements such as deployment, upgrade, Windows PowerShell, health monitoring, troubleshooting, scalability, resource throttling, high availability, backup and restore, disaster recovery, security and virtualization.
Jie Li is a Technical Product Manager on the SharePoint team at Microsoft.  His main focus is on SharePoint IT Pro readiness. He used to work in many different customers, from small business to enterprise, as a technology specialist for Microsoft China. Before Microsoft, Jie worked as an IT consultant for multinational companies.

Barry Briggs is Chief Architect and CTO for Microsoft’s IT organization, serving one of the world’s largest and most influential technology companies. Among other key initiatives, he drives the Enterprise Architecture practice for MSIT as well as numerous advanced technology programs. Previously at Microsoft he led the Master Data Management initiative in MSIT which created the world’s largest Customer Data Integration (CDI) system. Prior to that he served as senior architect in the Business Process and Integration Division at Microsoft, where he helped set the technology strategy for Microsoft’s enterprise integration and business process product line. Barry’s thirty-year career in the software industry includes eleven years at Lotus/IBM where he led the development of the company’s best-selling spreadsheet program and was named the company’s first Lotus Fellow.  After Lotus/IBM, Barry held a number of senior executive positions serving as CTO for a number of successful software vendors. Well known in the industry (called “one of the better known CTO’s in the world” by InfoWorld in 2001), Barry speaks frequently at industry events. He is the author of numerous technical articles, two novels, and the popular “Barry Talks!” weblog (http://www.edithere.com/barry).

Been provided with a hosted SharePoint site? Wondering what to do next?   Join Viral and find out some of the great things that SharePoint can help you with in managing and promoting your user group

Join us to discover how to increase productivity using  Office Live Meeting.  In this 60-minute presentation, you will learn best practices for successful presenting through live demonstrations, as well as your questions! 
Topics discussed include:
• How to access the Office Live Meeting Service and configure your account to get started today!
• Scheduling Live Meetings using the Conferencing Add-in for Outlook and using Meet Now to collaborate instantly with anyone.
• Best practices for keeping attendees engaged with interactive meeting features.
• References to additional Office Live Meeting support and resources will also be provided.

Natasha Palandri has been a trainer with the Office Live Meeting Adoption Services group for over 4 years. With previous experience as a classroom technology trainer, she brings a particular understanding of the strategies new Live Meeting users may find helpful when transitioning from face-to-face to virtual communication and collaboration. In particular, Natasha enjoys exploring best practices for effectively working across cultures, and within the virtual team model.

Andy Sernovitz is author of “Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking”.  He’s a very popular speaker, having been invited back 7 times to present at Microsoft.  Andy is going to share strategies for using word of marketing to build user groups.  Andy is not just a word of mouth expert – he’s also a full-time community manager as CEO of socialmedia.org. He spends his days working on applying social media skills specifically to the art of groups like yours.  The good news - Those same skills that make you a great group leader happen to be the same skills that will make you a great word of mouth marketer.  This is going to be a practical, hands-on session that focuses on how to get new members, get them active, and get them excited.  You’ll learn how to:  find the right people to talk about you, give them something to talk about, create tools to make it easier for them to talk to each other, and participate in the conversation.

SysInternals was created in 1996 by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell to host their advanced system utilities and technical information. The SysInternal tools are now available for free from Microsoft TechNet, and for the technical expert are probably some of the most valuable tools available. Whether you’re an IT Pro or a developer, you’ll find Sysinternals utilities to help you manage, troubleshoot and diagnose your Windows systems and applications. If you have a question about a tool, how to use them, or simply a story to tell about they saved you one day, come and talk to Mark.
 
Some of the key "under the hood" changes to Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 were developed under the guidance of Mark. If you want to know why we removed the dispatcher spinlock, or think our replacing it with some new primatives and a pre-wait thread state was the wrong approach, come and talk Mark about this or any other part of the core OS.
 
Mark Russinovich is a Technical Fellow in the Platform and Services Division at Microsoft. Russinovich is a widely recognized expert in Windows operating system internals as well as operating system architecture and design. He joined Microsoft when Microsoft acquired Winternals software, the company he cofounded in 1996 and where he worked as Chief Software Architect.  He is also cofounder of Sysinternals.com, where he wrote and published dozens of popular Windows administration and diagnostic utilities including Autoruns, Process Explorer and Tcpview.

Microsoft Research is at the cutting edge on a wide variety of technology and related social disciplines. Just a few of the projects currently being worked on are WorldWide Telescope, Bing Translator, Situated Interaction, Dryad and DryadLinq, as well as various projects to bring technology and financial benefits to third world and disadvantaged users, You can see many more at http://research.microsoft.com.

As senior vice president, Richard (Rick) F. Rashid oversees worldwide operations for Microsoft Research, an organization encompassing more than 850 researchers across six labs worldwide. Before joining Microsoft, Rashid was professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). Rashid's research interests have focused on artificial intelligence, operating systems, networking and multiprocessors. He also co-developed of one of the earliest networked computer games, "Alto Trek," during the mid-1970s.

In this Fireside Chat, Rick will talk about some of the technologies being worked on in research labs today and provide some insights into some of the opportunities that technology will enable in the future. Whether it be through new user interfaces, or by means of computers that can act on behalf of users, technology will deliver even more benefits to individuals and society as a whole in years to come.

Meet and chat with Brjann Brekkan, Senior Technical Product Manager at Microsoft responsible for the Identity and Access Management solution. Understand how the IAM solutions enable companies to provide secure remote access and how to extend well managed identities from on premises to partners and cloud services. 
Brjann will answer general questions on the capabilities and deployment of Forefront Identity Manager 2010, AD Federation Services as well as how Forefront Unified Access Gateway is used in the IAM solution. This is a great opportunity to explore how the added features empower users through self-service of group and password management, federated identity as well as certificate management or core provisioning and synchronization.