No keynote today, but still some great content.
First up was Windows Intune in the Enterprise, which touched on some of the new capabilities that were included with Monday’s release, including Active Directory integration and Mobile Device Management.
Next up was the upcoming MDOP UE-V session, which included some great demos of user settings following a user across a local application, a remote app session and App-V. For users who have to work across mixed environments like this there will be many benefits over and above what roaming profiles have offered in the path, especially in terms of performance.
After lunch was the Windows 8 Demo session. One of the messages that was repeated from yesterday’s keynote was around still being able to do all the things you need from desktop, which I interpreted as saying “let go of the Start Menu, people! It’s gone!”. The demos started a little too similar to the keynote session for my liking, but then they really picked up and I was able to learn some nice tips and tricks which will make life with Windows 8 much easier. I’ve got the latest build installed on my Iconia W500, and now have new things to try.
Enabling Disaster Recovery With Hyper-V Replicas was the next session, and it was great to see what will be included in the box with the next version of Windows Server and Hyper-V Server, very simple wizard driven cross site replication capabilitie. Having an off premise replica is really something that will be within the reach of customers of all sizes. This really has the potential to change the DR landscape in a very positive way.
The final session of the day was Windows 8 Image Validation with the ADK, which gave some great insight into the new performance troubleshooting tools. For any of you who worked with the Velocity tools in the early days will remember how bad an experience it was, but the ADK really does do a much better job. Highly recommended for investigation if you are building corporate images, building OEM images, or even testing your own personal builds to see just what components are misbehaving.
Tomorrow I’ll be attending some SMB sessions (both Small & Medium Business and System Message Block) sessions, along with more Windows Intune sessions and Windows 8 sessions. Then it’s time to figure out some travel plans…