Tech Ed 2006 kicked off Sunday night with the keynote presentation delivered by Bob Muglia, Senior Vice President, Server & Tools Business with help from Ray Ozzie. Chief Technical Officer and Chris Capossela, Corporate Vice President, Information Worker Product Management Group.   Muglia's focus for the presentation was based on four key promises Microsoft is making to customers this year along with an announcement of a new security and protection line of products for both the client and server called ForeFront.

 

The four key promises Microsoft is making to customers and partners is to: Manage complexity and achieve agility, protect information and control access, advance businesses with IT solutions, and amplify the impact of people.

 

In order to see Microsoft's commitment to deliver on these products, demonstrations were provided on some of the new and upcoming enhancements available in Vista, Longhorn Server, Office 2007, Virtual Machine Manager, Compute Cluster Server, Visual Studio Team Data, the Expression suite and newly announced ForeFront.

 

The System Center Virtual Machine Manager demonstration provided by Bill Anderson highlighted the new capabilities of virtualization using Microsoft's virtual server including the ability to add memory or resources to a running virtual image on the fly, improved capacity for memory with support of up to 32 gigs, as well as the ability to support up to 8 processors.   A preview of System Center Operations Manager, formerly known as Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM), was also given providing attendees with a live demonstration of the improved alert and diagnostic capabilities of the system.

 

The announcement of Microsoft ForeFront included a live demonstration from Kuleen Bharadwaj on some of the protection capabilities for the client operating system, server applications and network.   From the client system, Forefront will work to ensure the system is protected against macros, viruses, and other malicious software allowing for up to nine anti-virus scan engines to run on the system from different providers.   Other key features of the demonstration included the ability to block files from upload due to actual file properties rather than file extension preventing users from renaming a malicious or undesired file and uploading it to a server.

 

The keynote presentation also featured a walk down memory lane provided by hometown hero, Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie as he reminisced on many of the technological disruptions he has been witness to throughout his career leading up to the major disruption he sees coming now as applications that would typically run behind the firewall, will begin to make their way to running via the Internet.   Throughout his speech, Virtual Earth was used to follow Ozzie along his historical journey, displaying each of the locations he had previously been employed and participated in the evolution of technology.

 

The evening closed with a demonstration from Information Worker Vice President, Chris Capossela as he explored the many new changes coming down the pipe related to the Microsoft Office 2007 client and server tools such as Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Exchange 2007 and the soon to be renamed, Live Communications Server.   The audience watched as instant message conversations and voice mail messages were displayed within Outlook and a PowerPoint presentation was created utilizing some of the brand new functionality available in both the client as well as SharePoint server such as search and slide libraries.   From Capossela's demo, the audience was informed that a Beta 2 of Exchange 2007 will be available to the public next month and that Office 2007 is still on track for completion in October 2007.

 

The keynote provided an exciting introduction for a week full of deep dives and training sessions on the technologies explored during the 2.5 hour long event.   On Monday morning, the conference center was abuzz with attendees moving about to gain the knowledge they need to return to their places of work and implement or develop on the many new Microsoft technologies that are just around the corner.

 

Site Note: There was a special guest appearance by Mary Lynn Rajskub who plays Chloe O'brian on the hit TV show 24.  Mary joked with the audience and made light of the "non realistic technology lingo used on TV".