Many organisations are starting to move towards agile development approaches. But most agile methodologies don’t define an “architect” role – so as an architect, what are you meant to do to help your team be successful? In this session Tom Hollander will discuss approaches he’s used and seen in teams in Redmond and Australia. Being an architect means different things to different people, and that’s a challenge for organisations to understand, and often a challenge for architects themselves. There are many different flavours of architect, each aiming to bring value to the business from a slightly different viewpoint. How do we keep the viewpoints aligned, and how do we keep our business customers clear? When you see a prospective aspiring architect (or if you are one), do you know how to help and support the architectural growth? Growing an architect is much more complex and lengthy process than growing a technical expert – and success is harder to measure. There is a wide array of resources available to help you out: assessment and peer mentoring, curriculum roadmaps, Certification for Architects and actual architectural work. Hear how MYOB are making business life easier for their 1,000,000+ clients in Australia and New Zealand. MYOB are creating the next generation of accounting software, bridging the gaps between Small Businesses, Accountants/Bookkeepers, MYOB’s Customer Service Team, and Third Party Software Developers. Learn how they are applying .Net, the Azure Platform, Windows Communication Foundation, Sync Framework, Windows Identity Foundation, and more, to integrate their clients on-premise systems, cloud based systems, and also MYOB’s back office systems. The retail industry, like many other vertical have complex IT requirements in that most of their IT hardware is locate in geographically different locations, yet there is still a need and requirement to provide a consistent front to consumers of this technology. This session will explore how to leverage cloud based services, such as the Azure App Fabric Service Bus to connect remote point-of-sale, and in store experiences with an online portal and shopping experience and existing back office infrastructure. SOA, EOA, COA, SCA, EA, TA, ESB ... every year the alphabet soup thickens. But what do you really need to do? Where should you start? How can you effectively get ready for things like legacy systems replacement, outsourcing and the cloud? The starting point is knowing the "what", being able to clearly identify the business transactions that take place and that you require, and being able to prioritise them. We will discuss how this can be done without spending years in analysis, and how to use integration technologies to enable a nimble enterprise modernisation programme of work. Following on from Paulo Rocha’s talk on identifying your enterprise capabilities, this talk develops a high-level architecture to implement the capabilities identified. The architecture is designed using patterns, firstly at a high-level, and then in increasing detail as the design is refined. We will also factor out common “infrastructure” services to increase re-use (security, logging, auditing etc), and explore the best Microsoft technologies to implement each feature of the solution. Organisation systems frequently grow organically and controlling this growth is a tricky task. However, we are doing exactly this at ING New Zealand, enabled by the Microsoft stack. We will describe how we approached the problem by developing a capability view of the organisation and the desired core functionality of business systems, defining a cost effective and functional technology stack for the desired state, and developing a roadmap that guides the organisation towards the desired state, shrinking legacy systems to their core functionality to allow for eventual replacement. The result is a more flexible business and more responsive IT organisation. Earlier this year, Microsoft released version 2 of the Sync Framework which included significant functionality improvements, in particular new Sync Providers which allow highly distributed data architectures to be developed. Now you can develop fast occasionally connected applications (OCAs) which automatically synchronise local data with corporate data stores held in the data centre or the “cloud”. This session will show how to architect and develop a data architecture where corporate data moves out of the data centre to “remote office”, or fully mobile applications. It covers synchronization topologies, optimising the synchronisation process, addressing security concerns, using the new Providers for SQL Server and SQL Server Compact, and synchronizing with the cloud (SQL Azure). Come and explore the future of data. We will seek to understand how exposing, visualising and interacting with massive amounts of premium commercial and public domain data is changing the way we develop powerful, intuitive and informative user experiences and applications. Learn about the new and emerging technologies such as OData, Pivot, PowerPivot and Project Dallas that are making data a first-class element of the web, the cloud and of enterprise application development. Customers are looking at centralizing their users' desktops and applications as a way to either lower their TCO or to increase business agility. Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and session virtualization (fka Terminal Services) are two scenarios supported by Remote Desktop Services in WS08 R2, and both have different pro's and con's from an IT and business perspective. From a scalability and user density standpoint, session virtualisation looks like the clear winner, but just how many virtual desktops or sessions, will you be able to host on any given hardware? In this session we drill down into the architecture of VDI and Session virtualisation and determine what key questions need to be asked and answered around user requirements, components, networking, capacity and end user experience and whether you are doing it for the “right” reasons. With business processes and customer relationships ‘fit to the core’, Les Mills International looked for a solution to their knowledge management and business intelligence requirements. Les Mills International placed Microsoft at the core of a new platform roll-out designed to reach out to the global customer base. The project saw the replacement of multiple, disconnected financial applications with a multi-national Microsoft Dynamics AX platform deployment. Using the market leading Microsoft CRM 4.0 solution, Les Mills manages club and agent relations effectively, with integration back to the core Dynamics AX environment. In keeping with the full Microsoft stack, Les Mills International now leverages the power of Microsoft SharePoint 2010. Neville Richardson, CIO of Les Mills International and James Page, AX Service Line Lead from Intergen presents the business realised from the full end to end Microsoft Stack deployment internationally. This session explores approach, business benefits and the technology stack implemented across all multi-national business units. Enterprise content management is the holy grail of SharePoint deployment. At the heart of it is how to allow users to easily file and find documents for their own use or publishing to their colleagues. Aoraki Polytechnic (along with a further 13 polytechnics in New Zealand) have been successful in starting to harness the power of SharePoint for compliance grade document, records and content management – on an aggressive time scale and at costs significantly below other alternatives. The innovative approach developed by Information Leadership (the information and knowledge experts) has enabled medium-sized organisations such as Aoraki to prove the value of SharePoint – to users and senior management alike. In addition, the collaborative approach seeded and managed by Information Leadership that allows them to share designs has driven costs down for all of the Polytechnics involved. In this session, Rob Talbot of Aoraki Polytechnic will share how this has all come about – and what issues they have dealt with. Sarah Heal of Information Leadership will lift the hood on the unique methodology that has helped to shape this real success story For the last few years, Bank of New Zealand has experienced a dramatic shift in how information is analysed and business decisions are made. At its operational, tactical, and strategic levels of decision making and reporting, BNZ strategically invested in its BI platform to provide the right data at the right time to the right people In this session Cesar Tirado (solution architect) and Dave Thompson (head of Business Intelligence) from BNZ cover how to get an insight from some of the business sponsors and provide a before and after picture, highlighting the value of BI in driving decisions Geospatial technology has been part of Business Intelligence implementations for years now, but until recently not much was visible in this space. We will be talking about the Enterprise IT level Geospatial, how it is changing IT as we see it, what sectors are affected, what people can expect for the future and what part Microsoft plays in this. A range of NZ solutions will be presented to visually showcase the benefits of adopting Geospatial Insight. A review of a customer casestudy will show what they have done in this space including demonstrations of some of the solutions in use and the background of these systems in influencing the business decisions being made within their organisation. Feature a guest speaker, Nishaka Ranaweera from Environmental Science and Research. With aim of Improving Communications for our Mobile (global) workforce, NZRU needed something straightforward and easy to use. Moving to BPOS was relatively straightforward and has: improved our Disaster Recovery processes, simplified access to Email and Sharepoint while roaming, provided 24 x 7 support for our global/mobile/multi device workforce and improved communication. Come and find out how. For several years North Shore City Council (NSCC) focused on ‘transforming’ its business model towards a citizen centric approach to service delivery and customer engagement. Digital channels and in particular the Internet, was identified as the dominant channel the Council would increasingly use for this. Find out how the strategic vision provided a path to a web-enabled technology platform that allows citizens and customers access to a range of information and services, enabling them to transact with Council electronically at a time and place of their choosing without having the need to visit a council office. During 2008/2009 NSCC adopted Microsoft’s Citizen Services Platform (MCSP) using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) as the key technology enabler to improve and further extend Council’s ‘online’ capability. Microsoft Consulting Services, together with DATACOM as their development partner, were engaged to implement MOSS 2007 for Council, and develop and deliver Council’s new website, customer services portal and Online Consenting Solution. The website and online solutions are being leveraged by other government organisations and this reuse is delivering on the MCSP promise of delivering value to the citizen. Portfolio Optimisation helps organisations outline clear and achievable steps to achieving the business desired state. Understanding the benefits, the risks and known issues are critical and in many cases these are not known before setting out to manage the portfolio of requirements and impact of change on an organisation. This session will share experiences St. John and Waikato District Health Board experienced on their respective journeys to realising benefits of portfolio management. Youssef Mourra, senior consultant & portfolio management practitioner from PIPC, will guide you through interviews with guest speaker, May Richards (ICT Project Team Manager), and share lessons learnt The next release of Configuration Manager is coming! For over a decade now, Systems Management Server and Configuration Manager have been used by thousands of customers and partners to deliver classic management capabilities to clients and servers. As we enter a new era for IT Administration, the System Center flagship product is evolving. In this session we present our vision for user-centric client management, and demonstrate improvements from Configuration Manager 2007. This session promises to be very interesting. We demonstrate a functioning product to showcase some of these major improvements, so you know you can't miss it! There are many common questions and misunderstandings circulating around application compatibility which can leave the customer in a state of fear or worse, paralysis. If you are not already conversant in application compatibility, then join Chris and Aaron (the "nerdy odd couple") for an overview of the questions you can expect to hear, and the straight talk answer you can provide in return. We won't arm you to become an application compatibility expert (though, if you like what you see, we could use the help), but we'll make those questions easier for you to answer so you can go about the business of keeping your customers happy and informed. Are you planning to deploy Windows 7? If so, this is a great time to explore whether you should use the 32-bit or 64-bit versions of the OS. Explore the factors that should be considered as you try to make your decision, as well as the benefits and pitfalls. Learn what other companies are thinking too. Ever wondered how Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) can simplify and accelerate Office deployments? Learn about the investments made in App-V 4.6 and Office 2010 and best practices for deploying and maintaining Office 2010 on App-V. We will arm you with the information needed to successfully sequence, deploy, customize, and maintain virtual Office. Eliminate the need to maintain logon scripts ever again by unlocking the awesome power of Group Policy Preferences in Windows 7. This session aims to: 1) Give a practical demonstration of what MVVM actually means and why its such a good design pattern for XAML (WPF and Silverlight) apps, 2) Highlight the Designer/Developer workflow, and 3) Demonstrate DI and separation of concerns to increase the testability and maintainability of your code. Premier Field Engineering globally have worked with a number of Microsoft Enterprise customers in the App-V arena. Application Virtualisation has excellent benefits that enable an organisation to dynamically manage their application deployment and reduce the amount of time required to regression test their applications. The session details various techniques that PFE help customers to utilise when looking at Microsoft Application Virtualisation and how they approach proactive reviews of their App-V estate. Need to migrate 5 or 50,000 Windows XP machines to Windows 7 while maintaining your users documents, settings and application setting? Microsoft’s Deployment Toolkit (MDT 2010) is the tool for you. This session provides you with not only the understanding of how to migrate your XP machines to Windows 7 but also the step-by-step instructions to take home with you for creating a repeatable and automated migration. You’ll be ready the day you get back to work to implement these tried and true steps. Let Deployment MVP Rhonda Layfield show you some tips and tricks that took her months to master so you don’t make the same mistakes to ensure your migration of Windows XP goes smoothly, efficiently, and makes you the star in your IT department. Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010 helps automate the OS deployment process. Learn how you can use MDT to migrate from Windows XP to Windows 7. Understand the differences between Windows XP and Windows 7. See the end-to-end deployment process in action. Technical How to for reducing logon times for corporate machines. Includes what tools to use and how to go about approaching the problem. With changes in Windows 7, that means you need to update your troubleshooting skills. Jeremy Moskowitz, Group Policy MVP of GPanswers.com and author of Group Policy Fundamentals, Security, and the Managed Desktop is just the guy to bring you the know-how. In this session, you’ll learn why you can’t just run gpresult.exe anymore to get the results you want. You’ll discover what happens if you reconnect to network after a long absence. You’ll learn how to crack open the Windows 7 event log and trace Group Policy flow to figure out what might be going on. You’ll learn how to troubleshoot the new Group Policy Preference Extensions. You’ll learn how other areas such as Offline Files and Group Policy Software Installation can be tweaked to give you just the information you need to fix what ails you. If you’re looking for Group Policy answers to your troubleshooting questions, this is the session for you. This is a deep dive of troubleshooting techniques used when Microsoft PFE and the GTSC have investigated customer issues with Applications. See the step by step techniques used to see real world customer problems and the investigations and resolutions that were used to get the application functioning correctly. Learn some of the techniques used, and the importance of understanding the sequencer, windows and your applications. Total workstation lockdown isn't for every machine in your organization. But some machines require it. It's usually those "public walk up" machines that we need to manage a little bit differently. The kinds of machines that are in the cafeterias, the lobby machines and library machines. The more we think about it, these kinds of machines are everywhere in our organization -- inviting attack and ruining our day. Who knows what crazy things people are doing ON these machines -- visiting strange web sites and installing evil software. The good news is that Microsoft has a slew of solutions to help you with this very specific problem. And, it doesn't mean you need to turn the thumbscrews and go from 0 - 100% lockdown either. Microsoft has a variety of technologies you can choose (and mix and match) to make your workstations as locked down as they need to be. In this session, Group Policy MVP Jeremy Moskowitz will demonstrate a myriad of ways to make your public desktops more secure. If your team is already using Group Policy, come learn about Starter GPOs, common GP Scenarios, the GP Preferences, and how to efficiently use loopback processing. Learn about Microsoft's SteadyState tool and some non-Microsoft tools to help enhance your control of this notoriously difficult situation. When everything works, Windows 7 deployment is great. But what about when things break? In this session, we'll look at common causes and solutions for failed Windows 7 deployments, looking at issues with the Windows 7 installation process itself (SETUP and related tools), Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010 (Lite Touch), and ConfigMgr 2007 SP2 (Zero Touch). VDI is one of the fastest growing trends in IT, and is arguably the most popular topic of debate within the desktop community. Most companies are in the process of treating desktop virtualization as a strategic initiative for their IT roadmaps. But questions still remain. How can I make VDI work for me? How do I manage complexity within an already complex desktop environment? What TCO can I expect from my VDI environment? This joint session answers these questions, and proves that an investment in a joint Microsoft-Citrix Desktop Virtualization solution is the best choice for your users and IT. Security is much more than just making sure your computers have up-to-date patches and AV software so see how the new Windows 7 features AppLocker and BitLocker to Go can help you tame the biggest security risk in your environment... your users. Get an introduction to AppLocker and how you can use Group Policy to finally get real control over what programs your users are running without the administrative overhead. Then learn how you can secure your removable storage devices with Group Policy and BitLocker to Go to prevent that valuable corporate data from falling into the wrong hands. The Cloud is not about whizzy new technology, rather it's a new economic paradigm; a new way to buy computing power. Join globally respected cloud computing expert Chris Auld as he shares insights into the business aspects of cloud computing. This session is essential listening for anyone intersted in cloud based Platform as a Service and Software as a Service offerings. Your employees depend on you to keep their PCs running at their best, whether they are in the office or on the road. Windows Intune™ simplifies how businesses manage and secure PCs using Windows® cloud services and Windows 7—so your computers and users can operate at peak performance. Windows Intune™ delivers cloud-based management and security capabilities using a single Web-based console that enables your users and your IT staff to work from virtually anywhere—all that’s required is an Internet connection. With the Windows 7 Enterprise upgrade included in the subscription, you can give your users the best Windows experience and standardise your PCs on a single version of Windows. You also get advanced tools for troubleshooting, security policy configuration, and virtualisation that you can download and run in your environment. Windows Intune™ fits the needs of your business by giving you big tech results with a small tech investment. With the simple setup of the cloud service, you don’t have to worry about costly deployment and time-consuming maintenance. You get a comprehensive desktop solution with a low up-front investment and predictable. Chris will introduce you to the next generation of Customer Relationship Management solutions -- Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011. In this session, see firsthand the exciting new release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, how Microsoft is changing the way that customers think about business applications. The Cloud is set to change the way IT is delivered. This session is designed to help explore the fundamentals of the cloud, as well as looking at some of the changes that it heralds. We'll also face up to some questions about our future as IT professionals and the opportunities that exist in the cloud Introduction to the System Centre Virtual Machine Manager Self Service Portal 2.0. This session will cover how the new SCVMM SSP enables Private Cloud scenarios, where the SSP fits in with the Microsoft Cloud portfolio and includes demos of basic SSP 2.0 functionality. Are you looking to migrate your on-premise applications and database from MySql or other RDBMs to SQL Azure? Or are you simply focused on the easiest ways to get your SQL Server database up to SQL Azure? Then, this session is for you. We cover two fundamental areas in this session: application data access tier and the database schema+data. In Part 1, we dive into application data-access tier, covering common migration issues as well as best practices that will help make your data-access tier more resilient in the cloud and on SQL Azure. In Part 2, the focus is on database migration. We go through migrating schema and data, taking a look at tools and techniques for efficient transfer of schema through Management Studio and Data-Tier Application (DAC). Then, we discover efficient ways of moving small and large data into SQL Azure through tools like SSIS and BCP. We close the session with a glimpse into what is in store in future for easing migration of applications into SQL Azure. Microsoft SQL Azure presents unique opportunities and challenges with regards to database performance. While query performance is the key discussion in traditional, on-premise database deployments, we show you that factors such as network latency and multi-tenant effects also need to be considered in the Cloud. We offer some tips to resolve or mitigate related performance problems. We also dig deep into the inner workings of how SQL Azure manages resources and balances workload in a massive Cloud environment. The elastic access to additional physical resource in the Cloud offers new opportunities to achieve better database performance in a cost effective manner, an emerging pattern not available in the on-premise world. We show you some numbers that quantify the potential benefits. Come learn how to use Windows Azure AppFabric (with Service Bus and Access Control) as building block services for Web-based and hosted applications, and how developers can leverage services to create applications in the cloud and connect them with on-premises systems. Hosted Exchange with Microsoft Online Services allows you to move your email from on premise to the Microsoft cloud, come along to learn how easy it is to move your companies email to the cloud. Learn what the options are and what you need to be aware of to ensure a successful migration. Considering moving an existing application to Windows Azure infrastructure? This session will cover the feasibility of migrating your application, as well as tips and tricks for easing the process through the way. Common questions that this session will attempt to answer will be "Why should we move to Azure", "What are the benefits, and my ROI", and "Will it be a challenge, and if so what should I look out for". In this session you will see Right Hemisphere's Deep Exploration running GreenButton to render content in the Cloud. In addition to hearing about GreenButton's architecture you will also pick up some valuable tips that the team learned while building their solution. Here are some of the things you'll see: Uploading large files to blob storage by uploading chunks in parallel to achieve massive performance gains. Mounting a Cloud drive (how to get this to work in dev and live storage). Using a zero byte blob to maintain a lease on a queue message (rather than relying on a fixed visibility timeout). Using the AppFabric Service Bus to broadcast events. Using IntelliTrace to debug deployment issues. Building big web apps requires unique approaches to storing data. In this session we share hard-won lessons from Azure early adopters on how they've combined Microsoft SQL Azure and Windows Azure Storage to handle typical storage needs in the cloud. We discuss sharding and data partitioning approaches and how these can impact transaction throughput in SQL Azure as well as techniques to get the best out of "NoSQL" data stores like Azure Table Storage. With the June SU3 release, SQL Azure became the World’s first true location-enabled cloud database. This session will explore the new functionality that spatial data support brings to SQL Azure with an emphasis on data loading and best practices for managing spatial data in this environment. Integration with the new SQL Server 2008 R2 Report Builder and partner products will also be discussed and demonstrated. In the most basic way, the Unified Dimensional Model (UDM) combines the best aspects of traditional OLAP analysis and relational reporting. In doing so it presents a "single version of the truth" that can satisfy multidimensional analysis and relationship reporting. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. The UDM can also define server-side calculations, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), actions, perspectives, and translations to provide a richer experience than just querying for results from a database. So beyond storing your data, the UDM can store information about how our data is represented and how it should be delivered and presented to the business user. In this session, discover through theory, demonstration, and best practices discussion, how to enrich the design of the UDM beyond the data itself. Two major releases this year from Microsoft - SQL Server 2008 R2 and Office 2010 – have brought significant changes to the world of Business Intelligence. In this session we’ll explore the three platforms - Data, Collaboration, and Productivity – that bring Microsoft BI to the enterprise. We’ll see practically how they work together to give more power, more flexibility and more manageability to both business users and IT professionals. Until quite recently Location Intelligence was analyzed by “backroom” specialists using complicated desktop tools. Database could be available, but often only proprietary binary file repositories were used. Results were reported in a manner of printed maps or, if you were technically advanced organization, by PDF. Today Location Intelligence is everywhere, promoted by governments and enabled by organizations of all sizes. Enterprise GIS is part of your Enterprise IT and your specialists are using IT best practices. So how did complex become simple? How can your organization kick-start the adoption of Location Intelligence and start reaping the benefits of geospatial knowledge? Using a plethora of visual examples we will showcase some of the common tools and practices implemented for our local customers and partners to make it easier for them to develop and deploy Location Intelligence solutions. Peter Ward will cover SQL Server performance tuning from the administration side, including index tuning and maintenance, query profiling, and more. Learn the bad development habits to watch out for, and how to tune performance for the databases used by your third-party applications. You'll walk away having learned enough to be effective, boosting your resume and giving you more confidence in your SQL Server skills! Need a fast data integration solution, but don't have the time or budget for heavy performance tuning? Come learn how to maximize your ROI by applying trusted design patterns to your Integration Services packages. We talk about how to set performance expectations, and how to put together a simple framework to record benchmarks for your ETL process. We go over the basics of smart package design, and then look at a number of design patterns for common data warehousing problems, such as Slowly Changing Dimension processing, Range Lookups, and Change Detection. Everyone is talking about Self-service BI and PowerPivot, but what does it really mean to my business? In this session we will look at how, when, and why to use PowerPivot. We will look at situations such as prototyping BI reporting requirements, handling new sources of data and the servicing of short term and long term projects. We also look at the architecture required to deliver PowerPivot to your organisation. The session will be demo focused showing all common scenarios for the use of PowerPivot in your organisation such as: Working with OLTP and other data sources: using reporting services as data source. Prototyping New BI requirements with PowerPivot Maximising PowerPivot reuse with Reporting Services and Excel Operational Management of your PowerPivot Environment In August 2008, SQL Server 2008 became to last major database to support spatial data. Packed with the wisdom of past spatial database implementations, come and learn how this powerful yet easy to use feature of SQL Server makes using location data accessible and straightforward. This session is part 1 of 2 and will serve as an introduction to spatial/location data. The follow-on session is Location-Enabling the Cloud – Spatial Data Support in SQL Azure Report Builder 3.0 that ships with SQL Server 2008 R2 is the next generation report authoring tools targeted at business users. As a stand-alone Windows application, it provides a rich report authoring environment that delivers numerous capabilities to accelerate report authoring, including wizards, the Report Gallery (to embed report parts), and shared datasets. In this session, learn how to design reports using Report Builder 3.0, and how to leverage the new functionality in your report designs. This session is relevant to those already familiar with Report Builder 2.0 and Report Designer. For those with experience authoring reports with Report Designer, this session contrasts the different report authoring environments. It also demonstrates how familiar Report Designer functionality is surfaced in Report Builder 3.0. So often presentations focus on the new ‘shiny’ things in the next release of SQL Server and best practices that only work when you have unlimited resources. As a DBA you live in the real world; a world where you are supporting multiple versions of SQL Server and where the limited time that you have in your day is being juggled between trying to keep the lights on as well as focus on your bosses next crazy project. In this presentation you will get real world experience from real world DBA’s that spend their life in the trenches. MVPs Dave Dustin and Peter Ward will share with you 10 tips that will help you manage your SQL Server environment so that you will have time to start focusing on implementing SQL Server 2008 R2 and utilizing the new ‘shiny’ things. Most presentations about SQL Server 2008 R2 focus on features such as Reporting Services now being able to use maps, sparklines, data bars and indicators to depict data; or how PowerPivot can be used to assemble and create relationships in large amounts of data from different sources. In this session we will not even mention Business Intelligence - this session is designed to show DBA’s why SQL Server 2008 R2 is in no way a minor release for the database engine. Peter Ward will introduce a number of new features that have been introduced in SQL Server 2008 R2 for the DBA, including improvements in locking and merging partitions as well as the new Unicode compression. So if lifting the hood on the database engine is your thing then this is the session for you. Ever heard someone doubt the scalability of SQL Server? Come to this session to learn about the biggest, fastest and most reliable SQL Server installations in the world. We'll discuss the hardware, SQL features and techniques that keep real sites up and running with mission critical systems. SQL Server 2008 R2 release introduces support for greater than 64 logical processors (LP) supporting up to 256 LPs on Windows Server 2008 R2. We will discuss the importance of this feature and provide details on SQL scalability numbers and hardware platforms it ran on. We will give insights into architectural learning and innovations that allowed SQL Server/Windows to scale beyond 64 logical processors and talk about the SQL Server best practices/recommendation for SQL Server 2008 R2. Microsoft recently introduced the FastTrack Data Warehouse Reference Architectures -- providing a set of balanced hardware specifications and software best practices for deploying Relational DW solutions that rely on Sequential IO patterns. The FastTrack architecture offers high query performance for large databases using cost-effective hardware configurations This talk will review the principles behind the FastTrack architectures, the best-practices for building a large data warehouse solution in the FastTrack environment, and examples from customers that have prototyped and deployed FastTrack solutions this year. We'll also discuss the coming Parallel Data Warehouse, and its positioning in relation to SQL Server and FastTrack. Using existing technology from SQL Server, Windows Server and System Center along with several free downloads we will show a running private cloud. Implementation with dynamic, fully online, load balancing between nodes, end to end monitoring console across all the physical and virtual nodes. We will have slides to discuss self service provisioning, automated patch management, automatic backup management and multi-system distributed management. Do you remember when we talked about Decision Support, more than Business Intelligence? Even today, when technologies and business have changed so much, one of our key objectives is still to help decisions makers. In this session we explore the critical architectures and information patterns that influence your decisioning process. We ask, and answer, vital, but often overlooked questions such as “What counts as a decision? How do we validate that our decisions were good or bad? Can we automate decision making?” Although dealing with important business processes, there will be demos, there will be technology insights, and hopefully there will be some humour too. This session is for the wannabe software business owner - how can you get started, what sort of things can you expect and what are some lessons to learn from? Join John-Daniel Trask as he shares stories and experiences from starting Mindscape and growing it through selling software products around the world. He will cover practical steps that will aid you in developing your own ideas into cash flow generating products and hopefully provide some laughs on the way. Are you design-challenged? Do you long for the days when user interface design simply meant following the Windows standards? Can you design screens in any colour as long as it's grey? Do you do your best to design pages that are usable and attractive, only to have them come out looking like angry fruit salads? In this session Shane Morris will tell you everything about user interface layout and design that fits into 60 minutes. This session is specifically for non-designers. We’ll cover tips and tricks to help you create professional-looking screens and pages without a design-school qualification. Real designers may get angry. Designertech is in the process implementing Team Foundation Server 2010. As part of this they are migrating from a Visual Source-Safe based development environment. This talk will cover their experience, tips and tricks, as well asdemos of • Creating team projects • Using TFS 2010 Power tools to modify process template, create alerts, manage work items • What needs to be covered when introducing new users to TFS • Paradigm changes faced when moving to TFS with a VSS mind-set Also covered will be strategies for migrating from VSS to TFS and the options they choose and why. Not your typical session but rather a game show with a difference… Your hosts are the .NET Rock podcasters Richard Campbell and Carl Franklin who are here to thrill and delight you. During the show contestants will be asked questions with lots of prizes to be given away. So if you’re after swag and want to have fun getting it, then this is the session for you. Visual Studio 2010 is out, and super-charges the developer experience. Come along to this session to find out how to maximise your developer productivity and to learn tricks that make you the envy of your co-workers. Many tips will also be relevant to VS 2008 users. JOOB is a new high-performance non-relational database used by .NET developers to create a new generation of applications. It is fully integrated with Visual Studio 2010, and provides an easy to use development interface. This presentation will cover what JOOB is, the architecture and how it all works - including a demonstration. The Jade team will also cover the benefits of the new technology compared with traditional databases, and examples of where the technology would provide significant benefits to developers. The .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 wave also brings new features to the C# and Visual Basic languages. Learn about the new features of C# 4 and VB 2010, how they make common coding tasks easier, and how they fit into real-world scenarios such as language interoperability, working with COM objects, and Office programming. What is workflow? Why would I use it? How do I use it? What are ‘workflow services’? This session will answer these questions and take you on a guided tour of the ground up re-write of workflow in .NET 4. The session will show how to build, test, debug and execute workflows as well as how to create, host and monitor workflow services. In addition, the session will also cover why you might want to use workflow: the problems it can help solve and the opportunities it presents. This session gives an overview of the upcoming .NET Framework 4 release, with a focus on making your development experience easier. See lots of demos showcasing the key new features in the .NET Framework 4 including MEF, improvements in data, additions to the base classes, changes and additions to the CLR, what's new for the languages (Visual Basic and C#), and of course, what's new in Windows Presentation Foundation and System.Web. Come and see how all these new features and capabilities improve your overall .NET experience! Using the latest Advanced Developer Extensions delivered with the CRM 4.0 SDK to build a web application using .Net forms and LINQ to present data from Dynamics CRM. The SDK extensions along with .NET can be used to 'roll your own' customer facing web portal, or alternative employee facing application. In this session Anthony will demonstrate how Visual Studio Lab Management provides an integrated platform for managing your virtual testing environments. Using Microsoft’s new Visual Studio Lab Management 2010 with Team Foundation Server 2010, he’ll create a virtual test environment on top of Hyper-V that mimics a production environment. Next, Anthony will show how the Build features of Team Foundation Server 2010 with Team Lab, can automate the deployment of a single virtual machine or an entire virtual domain. You can then execute automated tests in this virtual environment to increase your automated test coverage. This is a must see session especially after the recent announcement that Lab Management will be available for existing or new Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate and Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 customers with MSDN Subscriptions. So you have developed your services, how do you get them deployed? How do you monitor and troubleshoot them? How do you scale them? These are some of the less talked about but very real challenges faced when providing solutions built on a service orientated approach. Windows Server AppFabric adds service monitoring and hosting extensions to Windows Server which greatly simplifies the deployment, scaling and management of WCF and Workflow services. This session will show how the new AppFabric extensions help you make the most out of Windows as a scalable, robust service hosting platform using both the UI tooling and the Powershell API. Join in this exploration of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 and see for yourself what all the excitement is about! We dive deep into the new product, discuss strategies for managing upgrades and explore all the opportunities to make the most of this exciting new release. If you’re a long-time Microsoft Dynamics CRM developer or consultant, or a BPOS or SharePoint specialist looking to engage in the CRM space, this is a session you won’t want to miss. During this session we'll explore in depth the capabilities of Coded UI Tests in Visual Studio 2010 and how you can use them to test a wide range of application types. Through your use of Coded UI tests, you can automate much of your user interface testing and have these tests execute on your build server. If you're a serious software developer and care about quality, this is a session not to be missed. Want to know what really happens when you execute your LINQ queries? Curious how the same query expression can target either in-memory data or relational data? In this talk, we use Reflector and other tools to reveal exactly how the compiler translates LINQ query expressions. Gain a deeper understanding of the functional roots of LINQ, as we see how lambda expressions enable the elegant syntax of LINQ to Objects. Then find out what's the same and what's radically different as we explore LINQ to SQL and the expression trees that make it tick. Foundational sessions share Microsoft's company vision, strategy and roadmap across our products and technologies. This sessions focuses on Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and Microsoft .NET Framework 4, including Application Lifecycle Management, Microsoft Silverlight and Windows Phone 7. Foundational sessions share Microsoft's company vision, strategy and roadmap across our products and technologies. This session focuses on Windows 7, Desktop Virtualisation, Windows Server and System Center. Foundational sessions share Microsoft's company vision, strategy and roadmap across our products and technologies. This session focuses on Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Office, Unified Communications and Microsoft Online Services. This session includes handy usage tips and typical deployment and configuration options for Operations Manager. The content in this session has no dependency on future product/feature releases and can therefore be applied today. The From the Field sessions will focus on helping you to diagnosis and resolve or design around common issues. The sessions will all cover core troubleshooting tools and processes. This session includes handy usage tips and typical deployment and configuration options for Operations Manager. The content in this session has no dependency on future product/feature releases and can therefore be applied today. The From the Field sessions will focus on helping you to diagnosis and resolve or design around common issues. The sessions will all cover core troubleshooting tools and processes. This session includes handy usage tips on troubleshooting Active Directory. The session will include common scenario diagnosis and resolution and will highlight the tools used by Field Engineering. The content in this session has no dependency on future product/feature releases and can therefore be applied today. The From the Field sessions will focus on helping you to diagnosis and resolve or design around common issues. The sessions will all cover core troubleshooting tools and processes. This session includes handy usage tips on troubleshooting Active Directory. The session will include common scenario diagnosis and resolution and will highlight the tools used by Field Engineering. The content in this session has no dependency on future product/feature releases and can therefore be applied today. The From the Field sessions will focus on helping you to diagnosis and resolve or design around common issues. The sessions will all cover core troubleshooting tools and processes. This session includes handy usage tips on troubleshooting Windows SharePoint Server and MOSS. The session will include common scenario diagnosis and resolution and will highlight the tools used by Field Engineering. The content in this session has no dependency on future product/feature releases and can therefore be applied today. The From the Field sessions will focus on helping you to diagnosis and resolve or design around common issues. The sessions will all cover core troubleshooting tools and processes. This session includes handy usage tips on troubleshooting Windows SharePoint Server and MOSS. The session will include common scenario diagnosis and resolution and will highlight the tools used by Field Engineering. The content in this session has no dependency on future product/feature releases and can therefore be applied today. The From the Field sessions will focus on helping you to diagnosis and resolve or design around common issues. The sessions will all cover core troubleshooting tools and processes. At Microsoft, Labs (Live Labs, Office Labs, FUSE Labs, MSR, MIX Online, etc) build bridges between technological vision and what's actually possible using the latest technologies. Building on the advances from Microsoft Research and leveraging customer insight from the product groups, Microsoft’s labs focus on rapid-fire invention and prototyping that lead to new products and product lines, as well as insights and inspiration for our product groups. This demo intensive session will showcase some of the latest inventions coming out of Microsoft’s labs and product group incubation teams. Many of the technologies addressed are or will be available for you to experiment with in your own applications. Multi-touch user interfaces are moving off your phone and into computing devices, information displays and even the furniture. Designing multi-touch user interfaces presents its own challenges, but add to that multi-user and tangible UI considerations and you have the makings of an ‘interesting’ design challenge. Shane Morris will take us through considerations for designing gestural and tangible UI’s for devices, large format screens and augmented reality interfaces. Along the way he’ll use examples from his own work, including Australia’s first publically demonstrated Microsoft Surface application (for Lonely Planet) and Australia’s first deployed Surface application, for the ANZ bank. Avoid many of the pitfalls in designing natural user interfaces. NUI is a study in contrasts, as well as a balancing act between the conventions people have acquired through the decades of using graphical user interface, and creating revolutionary user experience. This talk shares ten important concepts—ten lessons learned, if you will—that the former Director of User Experience for Microsoft Surface and his team learned over the course of developing this ground-breaking product. This talk discusses some of the common pitfalls teams have encountered as well as ways of thinking about natural user interface to bring your projects to a new level of design and interaction. Team One Beep from the University of Auckland made NZ history when they won third place in the Imagine Cup 2010 Worldwide competition in Poland earlier this year. Come and see a live demonstration of their innovative project and hear the exciting journey they took to get there. As .NET programmers we do most of our work in familiar languages like C# and Visual Basic. But one size doesn’t fit all. Effective programmers use the right tool for the right job. And there are many jobs we can do more quickly and enjoyably by using the range of innovative tools and languages that have grown up around .NET and Visual Studio – without sacrificing our investment in C#, Visual Basic and the .NET Framework. See how you can conquer parallel and cloud programming, create expressive new idioms to make your code clearer and more compact, build dynamic Web pages without sacrificing safety and testability, and much much more. Take a look beyond the familiar! August de los Reyes discusses the evolution human-computer interaction and how Natural User Interface is changing everything! This talk discusses how we got to where we are today, as well as what is in store for us in the next phase in user experience design. Grounded in design, philosophy, and the social sciences, the talk approaches user interface from a unique viewpoint: topics include starfish, spiders, Spanish moss, vampires, werewolves, and video games—all culminating into a glimpse of what is to come. SharePoint 2010 and Access work together seamlessly. - Publish Access databases to SharePoint and share them with others. - Reduce confusion with better database versioning. - Simplify deployment of Access forms and reports while still maintaining control of them. During this session you will learn how you can use Access Services to build and deliver reports to your organization in a quick and timely manner. If your company has data locked away in databases or has access databases running wild around the business then this session will give you some ideas on how to solve those problems. Dashboards are most powerful when they provide a tailored experience for users, integrated into existing business processes. SharePoint provides limitless opportunities for creating a custom BI experience for users. This session covers the basics of working with PerformancePoint Services to build organisational dashboards, scorecards, and analytic reports. We also provide several examples of how PerformancePoint Services dashboards and reports can be integrated with custom content and SharePoint capabilities, such as workflow, to create an experience that blends perfectly with your existing SharePoint investments. This session will show how to build business applications with no code using the new evolution of the business data catalogue. This enables IT to deliver more value to the business more quickly. This session will also show you how to connect workflow to business processes without using any code. DPM 2010 was recently released to market, so this session on everything that a systems administrator needs to understand about protecting Microsoft SharePoint with Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager. With the new DPM 2010 feature set, SharePoint Administrators gain the ability to protect entire the entire farm, including the auto-protection of new content databases. And with the removal of the Recovery Farm in MOSS 2010, DPM has an even stronger restore story for SharePoint customers. We will talk about how DPM uses the SharePoint VSS writers and components to provide a wholly supported and reliable protection and recovery experience for SharePoint deployments from 2003 to 2010. And for the other SQL Servers, not including the content database servers, learn how DPM 2010 now provides auto-instance protection, enterprise scale backups, and self-service restores for DBA’s. If you manage SharePoint or SQL Server within your environment, consider “How do you plan on backing up your farms and databases?” and then come to this session to learn the answer. Various improvements have been made to InfoPath 2010. Come and learn some tips and tricks for business users and developers for creating robust InfoPath forms. Without writing code, advanced business users can use InfoPath 2010 to design sophisticated electronic forms to quickly and cost-effectively gather information. Managed metadata services is one of the most exciting new features in SharePoint 2010. Columns that can store Hierarchies and Content Types that can be shared across Site Collections! It makes ECM easier , allows companies to better store and support business taxonomies (and folksonomies) and simplifies the management of metadata across a large enterprise. Learn the process end to end. The demonstrations will work through all steps from; • The Hub and Content type Syndication; • Site Administration of setting up meaningful Managed Metadata Term sets; • Creating Columns and Content Types and consuming these in libraries and lists • and through to the End Users Perspective of how to use this metadata in navigation and search to find the information later. Got Data? Need Reports? Leverage Excel 2010 and PowerPivot to bring together seemingly disparate information and deliver reports that are meaningful to you and your customers. PowerPivot is a new feature available in Excel 2010 that helps everyone make faster and better business decisions. SharePoint has been widely adopted across the world as the de facto standard for collaboration within the firewall. Microsoft is reinforcing SharePoint as a platform to support not just business productivity but also helping digital internet properties to quickly reach customers, retaining loyalty and generating new revenue. The new SharePoint based Digital Marketing platform incorporates search-based technology that aids users in rapidly finding the information they’re seeking, which aids in deflecting calls from customer call centres. In this presentation, the audience can learn about the vision, business values, new features and the deployment accelerator for the platform. You may have heard about some of the new features, but how do they impact architecture and administration? In this session, we'll explore the new features and demo the big ones that make your life easier. Significant architectural changes have been made between SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010, including a complete removal of the Shared Services Provider and the ability to have redundant indexing functionality in a farm. Visio Services is an exciting new capability available in SharePoint Server 2010. This overview session introduces the how and why of contextual data visualization using Visio on the desktop and Visio Services in SharePoint. Using a breadth of creative examples, we'll present how easy it is to create rich and dynamic process diagrams as well as aggregating various BI data sources into dynamic diagrams that can be shared using SharePoint Join Geoff Anderson for a whirlwind tour of some of the best new value in Office 2010 for businesses, and a discussion of the tools and guidance available to help IT get it into the hands of users. WSSv3 themes are now deprecated, content pages are super flexible (even without page layouts), the OOTB masterpages have some great new tricks, and Silverlight is starting to be used within the UI. This session will look at some new branding options, and discuss the place of “oldschool” techniques (such as render templates, control templates, alternatecss, application pages etc) - along with an update on solution architecture considerations and deployment techniques. In this session you will learn about the major investment areas in claims based identity for SharePoint 2010. You will see how SharePoint 2010 leverages claims based identity for authentication, authorization and services in a heterogeneous identity environment. This includes an overview of using Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) 2.0 with Windows Identity Foundation (WIF), establishing trust with external identity providers, creating custom identity providers, using the ADFS claims processing engine and attribute stores to support business security rules, customizing the user experience in SharePoint to support cross-organisational identities and put the world at you footsteps for collaboration. This session will look at the following aspects of Enterprise Search: Design, install, administer and monitor FAST Search for SharePoint. Key Topics that contribute to building successful search driven applications: - Search Reporting and Analytics - Linguistics - Relevancy and Ranking Learn how to create enterprise search solutions that leverage out-of-the-box FAST Search for SharePoint Sandbox Solutions in SharePoint 2010 provides a framework for safe and rapid deployment of customisations into a Web Farm. However these solutions do run in a sandbox and we need to play nicely without throwing our toys out. This talk will peel away the layers from both a developer and IT Pro perspective and look at what you can and can’t do; the pros and cons of Sandbox Solutions; how you can manage the Sandbox environment; and how you can break out of the sandbox if you really need to. So bring you spades and buckets and learn how to play nicely in the Sandbox. Implementing a good security framework is critical for delivering a top-notch BI solution within and outside of your firewall. In this session we discuss the core things to consider with Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and demonstrate how to implement Kerberos with MOSS 2010, Excel 2010 and Windows 2008 R2. Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 were designed to deliver your organization more value when used together. In this session, Geoff Anderson looks at some of the main ways SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 light each other up, make each other easier to use, and give you a more cost-effective platform to deliver the best productivity experience across the PC, Phone and Browser. This session will cover how to plan for upgrading your SharePoint 2003 and 2007 server farms to SharePoint 2010. We will cover the tools available today and how you can test your existing SharePoint 2007 deployment for upgrade compatibility. We will also cover important planning steps for a successful upgrade project and how to upgrade using the available upgrade paths. SharePoint 2010 includes the new Business Connectivity Services (BCS) features – the evolution of the Business Data Catalog. This talk is a deep dive into development with Business Connectivity Services using Visual Studio 2010. It covers both simple and advanced data modeling, using the BCS APIs to create metadata models and connecting those models to search. This talk also covers how to create External Content Types and External Lists programmatically, performance tuning techniques and taking external data offline to Office 2010. Cloud, it’s all about the Cloud. Usually the first thing to come to mind is what happens to my stuff in the Cloud? Is it safe, secure, and protected from everyone else in the Cloud? What kind of isolation do applications have from other apps? How is data protected in the Cloud and am I even allowed to put my data there? How is access controlled to my services and how good is it? Do we have to learn a whole new set of security protocols and establish yet another user credential base? In this session we’ll discuss these concerns and how Windows Azure addresses them. We’ll also talk about data redundancy, co-location concerns and how you can use Cloud services to federate identities with your partners. Don't let down your defenses - the bad guys won't! This session focuses on the cool tricks that the bad guys use to attack your website, and will help you become a better developer. How do you defend your website against the attacks the bad guys will throw at it? This code-focussed talk will cover some tips and tricks, out of the box features and extensions to make your web applications as strong as possible. This level 300 session is an introduction to the process of deploying Forefront Identity Manager (FIM) 2010. In this live demo driven session we will cover: · Creation of management agents to manage identities in AD and ADLDS · Deployment of the FIM Service to enable: o Self-service password reset o User self-management of groups and distribution lists o Creation of an organisational “white pages” This deep technical session is building on the previous Tech Ed session “Forefront Identity Manager Deployment Primer”. The goal of the session is to introduce more advanced concepts for the management of identities in AD and ADLDS through the provisioning of users in Forefront Identity Manager (FIM). This live demo driven session will cover: • Creation of workflows for the declarative provisioning of users • Extending the FIM schema • Custom set definition through XPath • FIM GUI modification • Creation and re-use of custom workflows As security professionals, handing over the keys to our castle for somebody else to manage in the cloud strikes fear into our hearts and goes against all our current beliefs. This session aims to demystify cloud security and explain how Microsoft provides a secure cloud experience for its customers. Forefront Threat Management Gateway 2010, the successor to ISA Server 2006, provides multiple security capabilities for protecting users while they use the internet. In this session we will demonstrate how TMG's web protection capabilities and how you configure them to protect your organisation's users. We will also cover new functionality added with the newly released service pack 1. This session will bust the myth that configuring DA is complex. We will show the steps for advance level configuration and troubleshooting of UAG DA with NAP and Forced Tunneling. The session will include demo of UAG Direct Access configuration, troubleshooting a broken configuration and a discussion of some of the most common problems seen in the field. At the end of the session you will walk away with the knowledge of how to troubleshoot common DA problems. Does this sound like you: You want to provide access to your services and applications, without all the head-ache of managing a huge identity store for each organisation you want to do business with. You cringe when people mention Single Sign On and try to hide in the broom closet. In this session we'll discuss how to achieve federated identity management. We'll examine how to use the Azure Access Control Service for authentication to your REST based services. We will also examine how to use ADFS and the Windows Identity Foundation to provide a federated identity and access solution for partners and external clients accessing your self-hosted services and applications. Delivered as a pre-integrated private cloud platform for delivering shared services, HP BladeSystem Matrix creates pools of server, network, and storage capacity to be dynamically provisioned to run your Microsoft applications. HP and Microsoft are working together to leverage this technology with reference architectures providing pre-build templates for rapid provision of Microsoft solutions. Ideal for simplifying consolidation initiatives, high availability protection and rapid deployment to production environments, the BladeSystem Matrix unites the tools, processes and architecture of your physical and virtual server worlds to speed time to service delivery. In this session we will look at the HP Microsoft Reference architecture templates designed to shorten your time to application delivery as well as physical and virtual server workload management. This session will give an overview of the newly released System Center Service Manager 2010, including the integration with other Microsoft products, and managing change & incidents in Service Manager. This will be a demo heavy session and you will see how easy it is to work with and customise Service Manager for your environment. HP Insight Control, combined with Microsoft System Center and Hyper-V, enables customers to consolidate hardware, improve utilization, increase automation, and enhance system portability. This session highlights the core HP server integrations for System Center, including OS deployment and updates, server and monitoring and alerting, virtual machine management, as well as packaging, licensing, and installation considerations. Live demos of these features are also shown. Learn how System Center customers can optimize their HP server and blade management experience and bring deep insight, precise control, and ongoing optimization to infrastructures running Windows. Why is Microsoft in the backup business? This session will answer that, as well as cover installing a new DPM 2010 server, and then provide an overview of the core capabilities and enhanced protection/recovery scenarios. The session is over 50% demonstration. Compared with previous versions, Windows Server 2008 R2 Active Directory offers a dazzling array of options for backup and recovery. This session will review the R2 features and provide real-world advice on how to make optimal use of them in your production environment. The demo-based session will cover the following: • Scheduling DC backups with Windows Server Backup • Advice on which DCs you should backup • How best to recover or replace a failed DC or DC component • The hidden dangers of using virtualisation features as a substitute for supported AD backup methods • Enabling the AD Recycle Bin • Fast recovery of AD objects using the AD Recycle Bin • How AD snapshots taken with NTDSUtil can assist during the recovery process • The importance of having a Forest Recovery Plan Dynamic memory is a new feature of Hyper-V coming to Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1. Come to learn how Dynamic Memory enables Hyper-V to more efficiently utilize system resource, and how this can benefit your environment. Also learn how Dynamic Memory works under the covers and what you should be preparing for with the release of Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1. Unifying management of physical and virtual infrastructures in Microsoft System Center family by utilizing Veeam MP for VMware to deliver monitoring data and Veeam PRO Pack to fully manage VMware vSphere. Addressing demanding availability and scalability requirements with enterprise-grade VMware-certified solution, available through System Center Calatalogue. Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 provide the automation platform and a set of solutions that empower you to manage the breadth of your IT environment. This demo-heavy session shows you how you can use Windows PowerShell 2.0, WMI and WinRM 2.0 to fully automate your Windows world all the way from hardware and Server Core to System Center products. It also helps you optimize your Server Management capabilities and shows you how you can scale your management experience as you move from Windows Server 2008 R2 Management tools to Microsoft System Center. Solution demos include Server Manager, Remote Server Administration Tool enhancements and Best Practices Analyzers (BPA) a new addition to Windows Server 2008 R2 that helps you diagnose server configuration problems and maintain optimal server configurations. Deploying clustered Hyper-V servers in Windows 2008 R2 involves a wide variety of technologies, including Hyper-V, Live Migration, Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager, Windows PowerShell, iSCSI and FC storage, dynamic and fixed VHDs, pass-through disks, networking, and more. Come learn about best practices, frequently asked questions, tips, and tricks around virtualisation, clustering, scripted and automated deployments, disaster recovery, and more! Bring your Hyper-V and clustering questions, and prepare to take your HA Hyper-V deployments to the next level Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V provides advanced Site Recovery options for Hyper-V, including both SAN connected environments and environments with only direct attached storage. Come and learn how to build site recovery functionality into your Hyper-V environment. RemoteFX opens new scenarios in terms of applications and devices that can access a rich PC experience. Releasing as part of Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, remote clients ranging from rich PCs to ultra lightweight thin clients will be able connect to a RemoteFX enabled Windows 7 virtual machine and receive a desktop experience that is near indistinguishable from a local desktop. In this session, we delve into the core technologies that enable RemoteFX, cover how they can be deployed and managed in your environment using inbox tools, and see some live demos Learn how to deploy a Windows Server 2008 R2 server image complete with Roles (DNS, DHCP, ADDS etc...). It's a snap when you know when how. But there are some gotchas like how to configure RAID you'll want the cheat sheet for. This session walks you through the Opalis workflow designer, demonstrating along the way how to integrate Microsoft System Center products with other IT tools to create automated processes. Also, see how Opalis customers have automated best practices for incident management, provisioning, and change management. Even though we haven't published performance data for Hyper-V R2, we have done some internal testing and seen that Hyper-V R2 performs really well compared to Hyper-V R1. It performs well enough that our Microsoft SharePoint Server, SQL Server, and Exchange Server teams will recommend that Hyper-V R2 is the best place to run these applications. See some of the performance data and how it stacks up. Learn how to properly identify resource bottlenecks in your Hyper-V solution, how to avoid common Hyper-V performance pitfalls, and best practices for performant solutions. Microsoft’s deployment tools are better than ever with the new Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK) 2.0. WAIK 2.0 contains the Windows System Image Manager (WSIM) to assist in creating answer files that automate your deployments, Windows Pre-Installation Environment (WinPE 3.0) to get your machines booted and connected to the network, the new Deployment Image Servicing and Management (DISM) utility which allows you to manage your images offline (no more Package Manager (Pkgmgr) or the WinPE command-line tool PEimg). DISM supports both .wim and .vhd image formats. If you are planning on deploying 5 or 5,000 Server 2008 R2 machines this session is a must see to find out what has changed from WAIK 1.1. Once you have new Windows machines built you will need to activate them and it’s a snap with Microsoft’s volume activation Key Management Service (KMS) – join Rhonda and let her show you how to install or upgrade from a previous version and learn the most common deployment and support issues when it comes to activation. This session will focus on the considerations and best practices for Disaster Recovery and Virtualisation back up. Disaster Recovery without expensive third-party replication products or storage solutions and Virtualization Protection for the modern datacenter. This is a can't miss session on how you can turn your virtualisation infrastructure into a highly automated and dynamic application servicing machine! See how Performance and Resource Optimisation (PRO) in System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 and System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 provides optimisation of virtual machines. The session will also cover how PRO tips can allow administrators to dynamically balance and optimize their servers at physical, virtual, and workloads levels. You'll see how PRO provides a unique and superior set of capabilities. The session provides an deep dive of the BranchCache feature in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008R2. This is your chance to dive into underlying technologies to understand how BranchCache works, as well as the requirements and deployment tips to obtain best performance. Come to hear about management tactics and best practices within the context of real-world examples. Microsoft Communications Server “14” introduces a whole new way to communicate & collaborate. This session delivers a full overview of its capabilities, and includes demonstrations of the new features and functions Communications Server “14” delivers. Microsoft Communications Server “14” delivers new game changing enterprise grade voice and video capability right out of the box. This session explains how CS “14” can replace legacy your PBX voice platforms and details the new voice and video specific capabilities of the platform. This is a companion session for "Exchange Server 2010 SP1 High Availability Deep Dive" session. Go beyond the basics of Exchange High Availability and gain a solid understanding of what you need to know to design a highly available and site resilient Exchange 2010 solution. In this session we cover Exchange 2010 Mailbox DAG design, including DAG sizing, database copy count/distribution, server capacity planning, storage design, and network design. This session explains how, Exchange 2010, you can use the archive mailbox to preserve and discover messaging content for your organization. We will also discuss in this session what's new in SP1 - including tiered storage, discovery performance improvements and new features for richer email access and discovery. This session covers both the requirements and the best practice recommendations for running Exchange Server 2010 in a hardware virtualisation environment. It begins with a brief overview of Microsoft’s support requirements for running Exchange in a virtualised environment, and then dives deep into best practices around storage and network configuration and monitoring. If you’re running or planning on running Exchange in a virtualised environment, you won’t want to miss this session. In this session, you'll get information on how to get more out of Exchange 2010 SP1. This deck is packed with setup and deployment tips, handy shortcuts, and useful tricks. Go beyond the basics of Exchange High Availability and gain a solid understanding of what's going on under the hood in an Exchange 2010 database availability group. This session dives deep into the inner workings of Active Manager and best copy selection, and the areas of quorum and witness, lagged copies, DAG networks, DAC mode, and monitoring, and then concludes details on the high availability enhancements in Service Pack 1 for Exchange 2010. Microsoft Communications Server "14" features a new suite of planning, setup, and deployment tools to use when planning new installations or making changes to a deployed system. This session will review these new planning and deployment tools, how they streamline initial setup and help manage ongoing changes to an operating infrastructure. This session will introduce the new work flow to follow in order to plan, author, and deploy a Communications Server "14" Topology. The new Planning Tool, the new Topology Builder, and the new Setup experience will be covered. We will also share details on the new Topology document, the new Configuration Store, the new Certificate Experience and these changes from previous versions deliver a significantly better experience for implementers and customers. The communications industry is undergoing a transforming from proprietary hardware-based communications systems to a more flexible software-based solution as provided by Microsoft. During this transformation, customers who have existing investments in infrastructure will need to ensure that these systems work well with Microsoft Communications Server “14”. In this session we show the different scenarios in which Microsoft Communications Server “14” can co-exist with IM and Presence systems, PBXs and leading video infrastructure depending on the customer’s requirements. High availability is a significant source of investment for the Communications Server team with the upcoming release. In this session we review the new Survivable Branch Appliance offering for branch office resiliency, the new features for data center-based multi-site failover and intra-site architecture for high availability. This is a panel discussion so come along and contribute to the conversation. What will web applications of the future look like? Is the browser the right medium to deliver web applications? What about mobile devices and ubiquitous computing? What are the roles of HTML 5/Silverlight? Can/should they live together in harmony? Are web standards holding back innovation? What about Privacy, Security and Content Protection? How is the business of the Web changing? Umbraco CMS is a free, open source, community-focused content management solution that aims to simplify the experience for building and publishing content-driven Web sites on the Microsoft ASP.NET platform. Peter Gregory is an Umbraco trainer who is very involved in the Umbraco community. Come learn about what Umbraco can do for you today, where the project is headed, and how you can get involved! Darren has been working closely with Internet Explorer 9 and other HTML5/CSS3 capable browsers to deliver usable future proofed websites. Join Darren as talks about Web Standards, why you should care and how to build websites that take advantage of the latest innovations—including CSS3 transitions, web fonts and the wonders of semantic HTML5. Content Management Systems are a dime a dozen. Often organisations roll their own or extend existing solutions. Come hear about three popular ASP.NET CMS solutions from advocates that work closely with these products. Kentico 5.5 supports Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0., Mobile websites, FaceBook authentication, out-of-the-box Microsoft Sharepoint integration. N2CMS is a light weight open source CMS built with C# and designed to run either with ASP.NET WebForms or ASP.NET MVC. While reasonably new, it’s approachable and easy to understand while also ensuring that extensibility points are available for power developers to create powerful .NET CMS websites. Umbraco 4.5 is a open source CMS that supports ASP.NET User and Custom Controls natively. It is designed to run ASP.NET WebForms. The upcoming version 5 release (due next year) is based on ASP.NET MVC. Prototyping tools today are much more designer/ devloper friendly. Also the nature of what we’re designing is changing. We have perfect conditions for a new wave of prototyping tools: rising demand and increasing capability. Shane Morris is one of Australia’s most respected user experience professionals. Join Shane as he talks about SketchFlow which is the prototyping environment in Expression Blend. See how to use SketchFlow to collaboratively design, evolve, explore and review user experiences and interactive content. It's pretty obvious by now that geolocation is a heavy player in the next wave of applications and APIs. Now is the time to learn how to take advantage of this information and add context to your own applications. In this session we'll look at geolocation at every layer of the stack - from open protocols to operating system APIs, from the browser to Windows Phone 7. Building a compelling geo-enabled experience takes more than simple coordinates. In this session Tatham will introduce the basics of determining a user's location and then delve into some of the opportunities and restrictions that are specific to mobile devices and their interfaces. ASP.NET MVC has been with us for several years now with version 3.0 just around the corner. In this session Jeremy Boyd and John-Daniel Trask will be covering some of the interesting features that were introduced in ASP.NET MVC 2.0 as well as looking ahead to the new features included in ASP.NET MVC 3.0 such as the Razor View Engine, first class IoC support and new helpers. Beyond showing the core framework, demonstrations of how to extend the core framework to really kick your development into high gear. So you’ve heard of jQuery, maybe even used it a little, but how can you use it to really breathe life into your web applications? Come and find out how you can quickly add rich interactivity to your ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC web applications by using jQuery which has an amazing array of powerful features and community plugins as well as now being supported through IntelliSense in Visual Studio. Jeremy loves jQuery and will show you some of his favourite tricks and techniques which you use on your own sites. You too will become a convert, JavaScript is fun again! With the impending launch of IE 9, Microsoft is ready for the next wave of web technologies - HTML5, CSS3 and SVG. Come along to learn what’s coming in the Internet Explorer platform for web programming, interoperability, graphics and performance through these newer standards. More importantly, we'll also look at why each of these enhancements matter. We'll do a lap around the new canvas, SVG, video and audio support, take a look at the improvements in CSS3 and see the benefits of hardware accelerated graphics. After that we'll dive into developer tooling and see what's new with the built-in debugging tools. Don't expect to see any slides - this will be an all demos presentation. In this session Jordan starts with a brief overview of the MVVM pattern before delving into the depths of a real world implementation. See how to get the most out of Silverlight as Jordan demonstrates a very effective implementation of MVVM that culminates in an intuitive and powerful display and navigation framework that works not only in Silverlight, but also WPF (incl. Surface) and the Windows 7 Phone! Maintainability, testability, performance, and security can be improved by understanding the components and tools and following some basic guidelines. This session uses Windows Communication Foundation RIA Services and Microsoft Silverlight as the key tools and covers the separation of concerns between data access, logic and presentation tiers, best practices for testability and tricks for getting better performance through design. We also cover best practices for locking down your application. Explore enhancements to the experience for Silverlight out-of-browser applications including the ability to host HTML content within Silverlight, custom window chrome, creating great install experiences, providing notification windows in your application. Get details on the new extensions to the sandbox that allow apps to run with elevated privileges and access the file system or interop with desktop components via Automation. As our ASP.NET Web applications become more and more successful we switch our focus from adding features to performance, scale, and management. Richard has been in the lab studying the scaling habits of the average domestic ASP.NET solution and has emerged to discuss his findings (no applications were actually harmed during the capture of this data). Come and learn where ASP.NET stumbles and how to get it back on its feet. In this session you will learn about the web acceleration equation, identify common ASP.NET bottlenecks, explore solution alternatives, uncover the secret sauce, and determine a reasonable strategy for scaling ASP.NET applications. There comes a time in every web application’s life where it must pass from the nest of development to the skies of operations. Once a web application grows to a certain size most of the effort around the application focuses on keeping it operating properly, rather than building it. When that time comes, there is a meeting – between the development team and the network administration team. At that meeting (if it’s a good one), key information is passed between the two teams: Everything that developers need to know about the network, and everything that the network administrators need to know about the application. It’s a test – and if you fail it, your application will too. This session explores exactly what each team needs to know to pass. Join Chris Klug as he demoes how to set up a full Smooth Streaming solution. He looks at all the steps involved, all the way from raw video to having it stream on-line to a Silverlight client using Smooth Streaming. That includes encoding video, setting up the streaming server and setting up a Silverlight player. He will also show how to set up Live Smooth Streaming and investigate live editing using the Silverlight Rough Cuts editor and talk about future scenarios including distribution to mobile devices. Do you wear a hardhat, a beret, or both? The free Windows Phone 7 software development kit comes with both Visual Studio Express 2010 and Expression Blend 4. So which is the right tool for the job? This session will cover the capabilities of both tools, highlight their strengths and weaknesses, and teach you about Developer/Designer interaction - even if these are one in the same person. Windows Phone OS 7.0 is coming! Want to learn what is new for the developer? This session covers the new application platform and provides a complete picture of the developer story. Learn about the developer tools, the application frameworks, the support for Microsoft Silverlight, and the support for Microsoft XNA. How do you make money from Windows Phone 7 applications? In this session Mark and Ben will tell you everything there is to know about marketing and selling applications for Windows Phone 7. The session includes walkthroughs of the Marketplace from a developer and customer perspective, along with some essential application marketing tips and tricks. We'll dissect some million-dollar examples from other platforms, and tell you how it's done. The warts and all journey from Mix to (almost) launch of a complete application. See working demos of the game in action and learn how to structure your WP7 solutions and gain insight into key APIs and related patterns and technologies such as Isolated Storage, MVVM Light, the Silverlight Unit Testing Framework and WCF Rest services. This session is aimed at developers who want to migrate existing Windows Mobile projects to Windows Phone 7 or to develop for multiple platforms in parallel and share code, resources and techniques. New features in Windows Phone 7 which can simplify development are highlighted. Missing features in Windows Phone 7 are investigated and some workarounds described. Together with part 2, this session gives an overview of the functionality for Silverlight applications that is unique to the Windows Phone application platform. Part 1 covers new input paradigms including multi-touch, software keyboard, accelerometer and microphone, as well as the APIs to leverage phone applications like email, phone dialer, contact list, and more. Together with part 1, this session gives an overview of the functionality for Silverlight applications that is unique to the Windows Phone application platform. Part 2 covers the new application model, [PT] new controls, integration with themes, and two new Windows Phone Web services[PT] you can leverage in your application – push notifications and location services.