Microsoft Tech-Ed Australia kicks off with stickfights and Exchange in the cloud

David M Williams
Wednesday, 09 September 2009 05:44

IT People - Training

Lee Hickin deftly showed off Exchange Server running in a cloud, providing anywhere online access to corporate mail and calendars. Migration tools provide administrators an effortless dream run synchronising existing mail and Active Directory detail to the cloud environment.

Hickin quipped that in this modern day it doesn’t matter if your mail server is on “1st floor, 2nd floor or Singapore” before taking a cheeky jab at the recent e-mail outages suffered by the free Gmail system.

Alistair Speirs showed off new facilities in Outlook 2010 to reduce e-mail and clutter, with “ignore” and “cleanup” buttons to get rid of annoying duplicates and junk. These exploit a new central concept of threaded discussions, with the main client now being able to collapse all messages that make up a thread into a single line item.

Speirs next demonstrated Office 2010’s simple image editing tools that allows the graphically challenged (like myself!) to apply artistic effects to ordinary clip-art and other imagery including – at last – a single button-click option to remove the background of any picture.

Sara Ford, program manager for Microsoft’s open source site, Codeplex gave a high-energy talk on new features within Visual Studio 2010, illustrated by an entertaining stick-figure karate game.

The resources making up the stick man imagery can be dragged-and-dropped right into source code files adding to the program comments. Tabs can be snapped off the Visual Studio IDE and dragged around, including finally to multiple monitors.

Sarah Vaughan concluded the introductory keynotes with a brief demonstration of the enhanced touch-screen facilities built into Windows 7 and BitLocker-to-go encryption for removable USB devices.

Additionally, and sure to bring relief to help-desk support staff everywhere, Vaughan presented a Windows 7 tool to automatically record actions a user takes, along with screenshots. The resulting file then allows far greater analysis and understanding than “my computer doesn’t work.”

Tech-Ed has officially begun, and iTWire will bring you all the news as it happens with Beverley Head, Alex Zaharov-Reutt and myself all on the scene.

Disclaimer: David M Williams is attending Tech-Ed as a guest of Microsoft.