I spent this evening at Microsoft UK, attending the inaugural Windows Server UK user group meeting. There weren’t many of us there but there was a lot of information passed around as Scotty McLeod from Perot Systems and Austin Osuide from EDS gave presentations on Windows Server 2008, Read Only Domain Controllers and Terminal Services Gateway Servers.
Based on his ability to retain technical information, it strikes me that Scotty has a brain the size of a planet and Austin quite simply oozes enthusiam (he knows his stuff too!). I intend to blog some more about the topics that were covered; however I did want to mention Austin’s technique for ensuring that his demo could complete, regardless of anything going wrong (although there wasn’t much he could do about the Microsoft Campus security closedown at 10pm). When preparing his demo, with a number of virtual machines running on VMware Workstation, Austin had also taken snapshots at key points so that he could revert to a basic system and walk through the process, or jump to any point in the demo with a partially or fully completed configuration.
Some people pray to the demo gods but it seems to me that this technical approach may be more reliable!
I agree Mark – the amount of information shared in just a few hours was amazing. Both Scotty and Austin showed immense enthusiasm for what they were demonstrating and both of them really know their stuff.
Using Snapshots is a genius idea and thanks to Austin I now have a more fault-tolerant method of doing demos and don’t have to pray to the demo gods (as much).
Your comment at the end summed the evening for me Mark “You are amongst friends” and that’s exactly how the atmosphere felt like.