MEC update #3

Busy day yesterday. John & I met in the speakers’ lounge for a delicious convention center breakfast. We fell in to a conversation about WLANs with Spyros Sakellariadisand Nick Cavalancia, two opinionated and knowledgeable guys.
My first session, “Big Security for Small Exchange Sites”, was well-attended. Many of the attendees, however, came from large Exchange sites, so I was a little nonplussed. My eval numbers were good, although the high sessions are doing no better than about 7.4 or so on a scale of 1-9. This is a bit unusual; the high sessions for last year’s MEC were in the 8.5 range. Of course, Steve Riley and Jerry Honeycutt, two of the MEC’s perennial stars, haven’t presented yet.
After the session, I had a pleasant lunch with Sue Mosher and Randy Bryne, where they mostly talked about incomprehensible Outlook stuff. Then I went to the show floor, where I spent more time in the security ghetto talking to anti-spam and content filtering product vendors. I’m impressed with Nemx’s PowerToolsproduct and IMLogic’s suite of instant-messaging logging/reporting/auditing tools.
Session #2, “Exchange Security Secrets”, was packed– they had to turn people away at the door. My energy level was a little higher for this session, and I spent about two hours shoehorning in new content right before the session, but disappointingly my numbers were slightly lower than the first session. Such is life. (In an entertaining twist, the database that’s supposed to give the speakers access to the attendees’ comments on sessions is scrambled– my comments page has comments about at least three other sessions, including two that got panned pretty badly. A little schadenfreude never hurts…)
I went to the big product show-floor reception and alternated between checking out booths I hadn’t been to and staying near the Windows & .NET booth, where people asked me some interesting and flavorful questions about SANs, ISA Server, and a variety of other stuff. I’d finally had enough about 8:30, so I went back to the hotel and met John for a late dinner– a giant banana split.