Paul's Down-Home Page

This year, my attendance at Exchange Connections was shorter than usual– I arrived Tuesday afternoon, presented most of the day on Wednesday, and then had to head up to 3Sharp in Redmond for a day of meetings with customers and our new PR agency, Hardy Communications.

The flight from Detroit to Vegas was uneventful, unless you count the guy two rows behind me who was snoring like a Poulan. I was actually concerned for his health. I didn’t see any signs of the Delta takeover; the FAs were as friendly as they ever are on NWA. Unfortunately, just before boarding I discovered that I’d forgotten my headphones and my iPhone sync cable. Sadly, that meant I was forced to work for the entire flight! (Arlene sent the missing gear to me, so I was equipped before my flight to Seattle).

This was a two-laptop trip: I brought both my T61 running Windows Server 2008 and my MacBook Pro. The MBP gave me a solid 3.5 hours of fairly heavy activity. For the few minutes I was using the T61, Windows’ battery estimator gave me an estimated life of 2:21. That’s not great, but part of the problem is that I’ve only ever had the big IBM/Lenovo battery, not the smaller conformal one. I’ll have to do a more even comparison in the future. (Also: my Win2008 installation won’t let me hibernate, which is a big pain in the butt sometimes).

My first session on Exchange Online went well, including some cool demos. The questions I got were pretty good, though there were a few I couldn’t answer. (My favorite: will Exchange Online support the BlackBerry? Yeah, when pigs fly!)

PowerShell 101 was, as always, a blast. It’s such a fun presentation to give because I enjoy seeing people “get it” as they start to internalize all the stuff they can do with the Exchange Management Shell.

Apart from that, I didn’t see or do much. My room at THE Hotel smelled like smoke; I had a good lunch with my Windows IT Pro peeps at Border Grill, and now I’m heading to Seattle.

Update: I forgot to mention that the Society of Exploration Geophysicists was in town for their 78th annual convention. Fun crowd! The geophysicists tended to be well-dressed and very talkative, with lots of hallway groupings, and a surprising number of women.

I’m glad to be able to talk about this finally! AppAssure has just released a free tool called Exchange Observer (registration required for download). This tool will automatically inspect your Exchange topology to find all Exchange 2003-hosted storage groups and databases, then give you a nifty tree view showing the status of each database. This is a simple, low-impact way to monitor all the servers in your org. Give it a try.

This morning I’m supposed to be shooting a short web video for Penton on desktop data management for Exchange. I expected one guy with a camera, but now my office has three people (plus me): a camera operator, the teleprompter operator, and the audio guy. They have more equipment than I can shake a mouse at, so things are pretty snug in my office. The last time I did something like this was when I shot a segment for an episode of Mike Nash’s Security 360 series; that was shot by a crew from Microsoft Studios at 3Sharp’s old Redmond office. Having all this infrastructure in my house is a bit disconcerting. I’ve been cleaning my office for the last week in preparation, so hopefully the finished video will reflect my efforts. (Don’t laugh; you should have seen it before the cleaning!) Perhaps the funniest part is that my kids now think I’ll be famous because I’m going to be on TV. They don’t get the whole sponsored-web-video thing yet, I guess.

In all the busy-ness of my day job, I somehow managed not to notice that David Gerhardt and Kevin Martin are writing a book, Building Content Type Solutions in SharePoint 2007. As a dyed-in-the-wool messaging and RTC guy who knows little about SharePoint development, I have no idea what the book is about. However, big ups to David and Kevin on writing the book; I know from experience that it’s a long and difficult road. Maybe if I read the book I’ll actually learn something!

Right now I’m sitting in a classroom in Redmond, auditing the UM material so I can be qualified to teach it. I had a thought a little while ago: the $18,500 tuition seems awfully steep, but if you amortize it across the 18 training days, that’s a hair more than $1000/day. Divide that by the 11- to 12-hour class days, and you come out with an hourly rate of, say, $90. That’s cheaper than hiring many kinds of professionals; there’s no way you could hire the caliber of instructors available here (say, Ross Smith IV or Tim McMichael) for that little.

Of course, this estimate ignores the cost of travel, and the time you actually have to invest in the class, but it helps to put the seemingly huge expense in perspective.