As many of you know, Quest Software’s acquisition of NetPro brought with it the industry-leading Directory Experts Conference (DEC), which has now been renamed The Experts Conference (TEC).  TEC kicked off yesterday in Las Vegas, and we’ve just completed Day 1. This is our first year with an Exchange Conference as a part of this event. If you’re familiar with past DEC events, you’ll know that this is one of the most hard-core conferences available, with pretty close to zero marketing content, and most sessions at either a Level 300 or Level 400 (= deep technical).

From an Exchange perspective, we had some great deep technical sessions today. In many ways, this felt like a small Microsoft Exchange Conference (MEC). Highlights included:

• Konstantin Ryvkin (Microsoft IT) spoke at great length in his keynote about architecting and running Microsoft’s global Exchange infrastructure, which also forms the foundation of Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite’s Exchange Online
• Ilse Van Criekinge (Global Knowledge, Belgium) gave a great session on Exchange 2007 Client Access Server (CAS) technologies.
• Brett Shirley (Microsoft) gave one of the most technically advanced presentations I’ve ever sat through on Exchange (and I’ve been working with Exchange since Exchange 4.0 beta!) in a level 400 session on the Extensible Storage Engine (ESE) … covering content that has never before been shared outside of Microsoft!
• Jonathan Smith (Ensynch) gave an outstanding presentation on Geoclustering with Exchange 2007 and Windows Server 2008. You never would have guessed that this was Jon’s first time speaking at an event like this (great job!) … his expertise came across clearly, and the session spawned some great interaction!
• J. Peter Bruzzesse (ClipTraining) provide a thorough presentation on the migration path from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007.

Looking forward to a great Day 2 tomorrow!  For those of you who couldn’t make it to TEC this year, you’ll be able to follow us on Twitter using hashtag #TEC09.  And you’re also welcome to join the TEC Facebook group, as well. Tuesday starts off with a keynote by Microsoft’s David Espinoza … should be great!

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