Introduction
In case you didn’t know already (which I would find very surprising), TechDays 2012 is currently held for the first time in Kinepois ‘Imagibraine’ in Braine-l’Alleud. This 10th edition is stuffed with lots of interesting sessions covering various topics like Windows Server 8, Private Cloud, System Center, Office 365, Lync and many, many more. (A complete list of the sessions can be found here.)
As was the case in previous years, there’s a main exhibition area where you can find booths from different sponsors, partners and vendors. Alternatively you could wander around during sessions, get something to drink (or eat) and socialize with other attendants.
MEET
For the first time, there’s also a booth from MEET (Microsoft Extended Experts Team). Throughout the three days you will find a lot of the MEET-members at this booth giving you the opportunity to talk to them and ask them questions about different topics.
Small tip: ask for the coffee! Our “MEETmobile” makes the best (FRESH) coffee @ TechDays 
About the sessions
Of course, next to all of the nice things above, there’s also what matters most: the different sessions. Yesterday, I was lucky enough to attend quite a lot of them.
What’s in Windows Server 8 for the ITPro – a demo tour
This session by Corey Hynes was very interesting as he went through quite a lot of the new features that we might expect in Windows Server 8. The nice thing here was that he gave a rather high-level overview of different things that will be elaborated on in other sessions throughout the following days.
I will try to cover the contents of the different sessions about Windows 8 in a blog post in the upcoming days.
Discover how Lync works on your iPhone, Android & other smartphones/tablets
At the same time as Corey’s session, Johan gave a presentation on Lync Mobile. I was lucky to attend the exclusive preview earlier this month, so I didn’t attend this one. But from the preview (and the things I heard from other attendees) it was very interesting with some nice demo’s in the end!
During lunch, Ilse and Koen tried “busting the myths” about Office 365. Something in which they succeeded perfectly. To give an impression of the myths they “busted” (and what you missed):
- The cloud is not secure
- You cannot manage Lync Online
- Setting up an Office 365 demo environment is difficult
- SharePoint Online has no public website
- …
The afternoon was mainly filled with session about Windows Server 8:
Windows 8 Hyper-V: Scalability
In the first session Bryon Surace digged deeper into the topics that Corey mentioned earlier in the day, explaining the new features in Windows 8 and Hyper-V 3.0:
- Native Nic Teaming
- NUMA Support
- Hyper-V features and scalability
- Hyper-V clustering
- …
To close off the day, I went to John Craddock’s session about Windows 8 Dynamic Access Control: technical but incredible fun to watch! This feature looks very promising and might be able to change the way we implement security throughout our infrastructure from now onwards… I look forward to be “playing” around with it in the upcoming weeks…
So as you can see: lots of things to do and to see. As an IT Pro I can highly recommend the TechDays. It’s been a few years in a row for me now and each time the sessions (and speakers) are outstanding! So if you didn’t register for this edition, you know what to do for next year!
See you later!
Michael
