IT/DEV Connections 2014

Last week the 2014 edition of IT/Dev Connections took place at the Aria Resort in Las Vegas and as an Exchange Server MVP I was focusing on the Exchange track.

This event is not organized by Microsoft (although Microsoft is a diamond sponsor of the event) and therefore the IT/DEV Connections event can be seen as an independent voice on Microsoft technology.

This was clearly visible in the Exchange Keynote session presented by Tony Redmond who gave his opinion on Microsoft, cloud technologies, Exchange server and the (lack of) quality of the Cumulative Updates that were released the last year.

I did one session as well: “Autodiscover – What’s the deal?” where I discussed Autodiscover technologies in a single domain (with domain joined members and stand-alone members), a resource forest environment, a multi-forest environment with a single namespace and an Office 365 hybrid environment (which is basically the same as the multi-forest, single namespace scenario). Fun to present, and fun to prepare.

Source of photo: Tony Redmond

One of the questions from the audience was about Outlook clients querying the root domain first for Autodiscover information. Fellow MVP Dave Stork wrote a blog post on this particular topic called “Optimizing the Outlook AutoDiscover process by skipping the root domain query” which can be found on http://bit.ly/1miWFKM.

The second session I presented was with Michel de Rooij on “PowerShell – Tips and Tricks”. As an infrastructure consultant I’m not used to present code snippets but looking at the feedback we got it was a good session. The scripts that were used during this presentation can be downloaded from the Microsoft TechNet gallery: http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/ITDev-Connections-2014-64e531d7

There were plenty of other good sessions. Paul Cunningham did an awesome session on ActiveSync, Wes Blalock (from Microsoft) did a very interesting topic on Exchange Hybrid scenarios and how to troubleshoot it, Sigi Jagott did a PowerShell introduction and Tim McMichael (senior escalation engineer at Microsoft, also known as Mr. DAG or Mr. Site Resiliency) did good work on Managed Availability.

If you want to see some other recaps of this event:

And for the fun part…. German MVPs Martina Grom (Office 365) and Toni Pohl (Client Development) analyzed data from Twitter related to IT/Dev Connections 2014, and came up with some nice statistics: http://blog.atwork.at/post/2014/09/22/devconnections-2014-Twitter-Analytics.aspx

Overall it was a great event, independent from Microsoft, the quality and level of the sessions were better than for example TechEd and the venue was nice as well of course. Looking forward to go there next year!