Carl Tyler's Blog

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Just spent about fours at a Microsoft TS2 seminar up in Manchester New Hampshire, before you ask I have no idea what the TS2 stands for. I was bored out of my skull, most of the audience seemed to be MCSE koolaid drinking type people, who got very excited at the opportunity of winning a flashing bouncy ball (I've always felt that freebies in a presentation take away from content not add to it).

I was expecting to see much more interesting stuff, the first 45 minutes were spent demoing Virtual PC, and the wonders of it all, having been a user of VMWare for quite a while I was under whelmed. I obviously threw in the killer question, do I need a separate license for each Windows Guest OS, even though it's on the same machine, and it's just me using it, and what a surprise, the answer was yes you need a Windows license for each guest Windows OS installed. The presenter whose actually presentation style wasn't too bad, then went on to show us Windows 2003 SMB server, again a big so what moment for me. They showed how the SMB server can automatically get the Windows update fixes so that people can hit a local server rather than the Microsoft one, and the Outlook Web Access client.

I had come to the event hoping to see some of the new collaboration features in Office 2003 and how it interacts with Sharepoint Portal Services, sadly the collaboration I got to see from Office 2003 was Outlook, where they showed a group calendar, hhhm, they have me on the edge of my seat now. In the end I could bear it no more and left 30 minutes before the end. The bits they did show of Sharepoint Portal Server, were basically like any QuickPlace demo.

Not sure I'm going to feel the urge to go to another of these when they invite me again.

A few pluses for Microsoft from the event though, and things I thought were well done:

• They obviously have graphic artists fix their slides - Techies give the content and then the artists pretty them up, but in slick transitions without over powering the presentation or presenter, so it does look slick
• The presenter gets pre-configured images for Virtual PC, so his demo system is the corporate one specified by HQ in Redmond. There were times when I was doing enablement for Lotus I would have killed to be able to send people a complete demo system image that people could run each time without having to rebuild their machine from a CD image each time, with eSuite, we actually shipped hard disks to people as it was such a pain to set up the server components, I wonder if they have had to do this for Workplace yet?)
• Slick registration, the email confirmation was sent to me with a barcode, get to the event and a barcode reader reads the invite and prints out my name sticker etc. This is done by a 3rd party for MS I believe, but it's slick and looks professional, although it was done with Palms and not Pocket PCs

One thing that came to me during the seminar is how easily something small about a person you see, or a smell can kick of memories. The back of the head of a woman sitting in front of me instantly reminded me of someone I used to work with, and there's always that disappointment when they turn around and they're actually nothing like them, it is strange how a small detail can kick of a memory, in this case it was the way the hair sat above the shoulder, but for someone else it could be as small a gesture as someone flicking their hair, or rubbing their nose. It's funny how everybody has something slightly unique that you associate with them.