I’ve made it to Tech·Ed 2007, which gave me my first opportunity for air travel. Yes, I had never been on an airplane before Sunday. Yes, I lead a sheltered life. I wasn’t worried about flying, per se. I actually enjoyed that part. The part I get anxious about is logistics. Just ask my family.
I made it, though, without incident, and got to Tech·Ed registration on Sunday night in order to avoid the lines on Monday morning. Monday morning’s keynote was rather typical, which says a lot since this is only my second Tech·Ed. Christopher Lloyd reprised his role from the Back to the Future series in another corny theatrical intro. They played a bunch of Bruce Hornsby that I enjoyed, but I don’t know what album it was. I’ll have to find out.
One interesting part of the keynote was a segment by [insert name here] from Gartner research, who discussed the importance of the latest important business concept (aka buzzword), Agility. He had a visualization of a “traditional” (aka non-agile) organization as a circle divided into thirds, corresponding to Business, Applications, and Sysadmins, with brick walls between them. Business identifies a need and tosses it over the wall to Applications. They build or buy a solution, then toss it over the wall to the SysAdmins to deploy and keep running. Not agile. He also said we don’t have good metrics for agility, yet.
The rest of Monday went by really fast, and so did Tuesday. Now it’s Wednesday, and half-over. 🙁 So far, I’ve been concentrating on Server issues and Operations Manager 2007. I’ve been to a bunch really good breakout sessions, a chalk-talk, and worked through some Hands-On Labs, which have been helpful in getting more out of the breakouts. I’ll summerize those in another post. Now, my tummy is rumbling and I have to keep my energy up.
I didn’t really get around to summarizing, did I… Well, there were really great sessions; so much good stuff, in fact, that I was pretty much numb by the end. But I was also reinvigorated about System Administration. I really needed it, too.