Interact 2008 Summary, Day 3
16 April 2008 — Mark StaffordThursday
Birds of a Feather
The third and final day of Interact 2008 kicked off with a Birds of a Feather session rather than a keynote. This morning, I sat at the Blogging table for a while before moving to the Voice Infrastructure table. At the blogging table, I met Scott Schnoll and Nino Bilic. Scott writes technical documentation for Exchange Server and struck me as a very friendly person. Nino manages the Exchange Team blog in addition to his day job, which apparently has to do with supportability for Exchange. The discussion started with several people, and one of the questions we kicked around was whether anyone’s job description actually included blogging. Although no one sitting at the table at that time had blogging in their job description, a Mindsharp representative showed up shortly thereafter to fulfill my prediction that even if it wasn’t happening today, it would happen. We also talked about where to find inspiration for blog posts and other forms of collaboration before I moved on to the Voice Infrastructure table.
At the Voice Infrastructure table, there were representatives of some larger firm talking about call center uses for OCS, which I obviously found interesting. Although I missed their introduction, I gathered from the conversation that they were using it in a very different way than we were: they wanted a telephony solution that would serve as a telephony solution; we want a telephony solution that integrates deeply into our existing software to bring together telephony and computing such that it is difficult to distinguish between them. Wajih Yahyaoui was managing the table and asked a number of questions about what we (customers) would like to see in the voice infrastructure. The one other noteworthy event was that I ran into a Steven White, who came out of Cisco and offered to answer some of my questions about the Cisco AS5400XM.
Topologies and Routing for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 (Todd Luttinen)
I don’t have much to say about this particular session. I thought that it would be more about single-site topologies (meaning configuration of server roles) and the routing through those different roles. Rather, this session was about enterprise-level, multi-site routing and its intricacies. Aside from finding the discussion interesting, it wasn’t particularly relevant to me.
High Availability in Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 SP1 Part 1 - CCR vs other HA solutions (Ayla Kol; Alex Wetmore)
I had a great chance to speak with Alex before this session, and was pleasantly surprised to find that he was a very down-to-earth guy. Alex was the lead developer for cluster continuous routing, one of the high availability features in Microsoft Exchange. After listening to my description of our needs, he suggested that standby continuous replication would probably be sufficient for our situation if our service agreement could tolerate 40 minutes worth of downtime. Of course, that all revolves around the Service Level Agreement that we should have in place (but don’t). What I really appreciated about this session was the atmosphere in the room. There were several Exchange Services team members in the room, and there was actually a fair amount of friendly heckling that went on. Ayla saw a couple of them come in and immediately told them (in a joking manner) that they weren’t allowed to ask any questions. The community atmosphere contributed significantly to the discussion, and I found that there were a number of people who were able to speak to various situations using real-life stories that made it to top-level Exchange support.
High Availability in Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 SP1 Part 2 - Disaster Recovery and SCR Deep Dive (Scott Schnoll)
The last session I went to, this was a great way to close out the conference. The room had the same atmosphere (which isn’t surprising considering it had the same people) for this session. Scott had a ton of material to work through, but he made it through efficiently and delivered all of the knowledge necessary to recover from a disaster in the event that one should occur. As I recall (and this is almost a week ago now, so it’s not word-for-word, but it does have the concept), Scott said that losing a datacenter was a good thing. There was one other notable quote that fired up the hecklers, but what I appreciated most about this situation was the anecdotal experience Microsoft had to share in testing their replication scenario between Singapore and Puget Sound. Apparently many more things went wrong than they wanted to go wrong, but they were still able to recover within three hours.
Conclusion
When all is said and done, I’d go back to the comments I made when starting this summary: this has been one of the best-spent weeks of my life as far as careers are concerned. I was able to network, dig deep, and find answers and vision for the solutions I need to design this year. I sincerely hope to make it back to this conference next year, and highly recommend that anyone interested in Microsoft OCS do the same.
