Tech Ed 2005 has officially started with Steve Balmer presenting as only Steve can. It's my first live view of one of his presentations, and while somewhat subdued to what I have seen video of in the past, he certainly is an extremely passionate speaker. According to Steve, there has been not better to be working in the technology industry.
Highlights included:
- Quick stage apperance of the new Lenovo / IBM Thinkpad Tablet PC - Apparently this little device has a 6 hr battery life. I hope to find one on the show floor.
- A great demo of PUSH technology between the upcoming Exchange 2003 update and mobile devices pushing messages and providing device managemen an security similar to some of the functionality currently on RIM's Black Berry Devices.
- Using MOM to manage devices at a hardware level, including a demo of telling a crashed system to boot from a backup drive when the primary device had failed. I definately want to look more into the remote manage capabilities of MOM.
Those are some of the key points, but now I need to decide which of the 3 sessions in that are about to start is the one I want to attend. More later.