Exchange Connections 2006 reflections

Exchange Connections 2006 in Orlando has come and went. It was a great week. I enjoy the "Connections" conferences much more than events like the RSA Conference or TechEd. The Connections conferences are much more personal; it is not unusual to see some of the best known names in our field like Mark Minasi, Tony Redmond, Sue Mosher, or Paul Robichaux casually sitting around with the attendees and talking shop. Especially Mark Minasi, Mark has to be the most up-beat and enthusiastic person in technology. I also participated in a lot of discussions with attendees from different organizations, all sharing their ideas and experiences with each other. This is one of the best part of the conferences for me.

I say "participated" because I spent much of my time this week on "radio silence". I got sick with a chest cold on Sunday and pretty much lost most of my speaking voice. Not a good thing when I had presentations to give, including an all-day session yesterday. So I wandered around much of the week in a medicine induced haze and sounding like Clint Eastwood's "Dirty Harry". Fortunately, I did make it through my all-day presentation on Thursday, though my voice hurts like heck today.

I managed to attend some great presentations this week including Jill Frank's session on Monad (if you don't know Monad, Exchange folks, [ominous voice on] you will [ominous voice off] and Sue Mosher's sneak peak at Outlook 12. The best presentation was Mike Ireland's presentation on the Microsoft Log Parser. Very cool, Mike.

I mentioned to a lot of people that the 2nd chapter of an eBook I'm writing (The Tips and Tricks Guide to Secure Messaging) has just been published. I promised I would post the link here.

I'm headed home later this weekend and then I turn around and head to Nice. After the Nice conference, I will post links to all of my slides. Thanks to everyone that attended and all the nice folks I got to talk with. If I have promised you any information, please email me and remind me about it.