HP E5000 videos finally released

You may remember that back in February Tony, Brian, and I shot some videos with Hewlett-Packard’s new E5000 messaging appliance. You might even have been wondering, as we have, where on earth those videos had gotten to. In an age where people routinely post unedited video on YouTube within seconds of an event, and where even highly-polished videos can be built and uploaded in a day, it seems that these videos took an awfully long time.

I was happy to see e-mail from Don Wilson at HP telling us that the final version of the videos are now available. Our two days of filming ended up providing material for six videos:

Introduction to HP E5000 Hardware, featuring lots of oohing and aahing over the E5000’s chassis. Although HP’s Dean Steadman is in this video, I don’t think you can see the bandage he had to put on after an unlucky encounter with a sharp edge on the E5000 prototype. Too bad; we had great fun mocking him because of it.
HP E5000: Complete and Optimized: a roundtable discussion of why HP designed the E5000 the way they did, and what they were attempting to accomplish with it.
HP E5000: Simple and Cost Efficient, in which we explore the thorny question of how you get support for something that combines an operating system and application from Microsoft with HP’s hardware.
HP E5000: Resilient/Highly Available, in which we explore whether you can safely use the word “appliance” to describe the E5000 (I voted that yes, we in fact could.)
HP E5000: Large Low Cost Mailboxes. Do you want to go back to 100MB mailboxes? Neither do Microsoft’s Jeff Mealiffe or HP’s Karl Robinson, both of whom join our roundtable discussion of ways to deliver large, cheap mailboxes to sate users’ unceasing demands.
HP E5000: Installation & Startup, in which HP’s Karl Robinson and I walk through the out-of-the-box setup process. (Hint: we skip the boring parts, like installing Exchange.)

Although I might be biased in saying so, the videos are short enough to remain interesting, and the E5000 is quite an interesting piece of equipment. I invite you to check out the videos and let us know what you think. If you liked them, tell me; if you didn’t, tell Tony.