I have already shared my recommendations for sessions to attend at the Microsoft Exchange Conference (MEC). Many of these sessions will be given by Microsoft employees, including members of different product development groups. There’s no doubt that great value can be gained from listening to technical information provided by Microsoft (especially the people who actually write the code), but equal value can be obtained by sharing the views of real-world experts, all of whom are more than willing to share their independent opinions about Exchange, Office 365, Lync, and related topics.
MVPs attending MEC
Microsoft calls these folks “Most Valuable Professionals” or MVPs, a designation that is awarded on an annual basis. Recognition as an MVP is often associated with contributions to the technical community such as delivering sessions at conferences such as MEC, so there’s no surprise to find that a good selection of MEC sessions will be either delivered or chaired (in the case of Q&A panels) by MVPs. In summary, 14 Exchange MVPs and 3 Office 365 MVPs will deliver 16 sessions and chair 7 of the “Experts Unplugged” panel sessions. This data might potentially change before the conference to accommodate the need to switch sessions, so be sure to check with the official MEC agenda at the conference.
The table below lists the sessions associated with MVPs. URLs to blogs and/or the MVP web site are provided to allow you to discover more about the individual MVPs.
| Monday, March 30 | ||
| 1:15pm | Using Exchange as a platform for Innovation (Exchange Web Services) | Glen Scales |
| 2:45pm | Exchange Unified Messaging Deep Dive | Paul Robichaux |
| 4:30pm | Modern Public Folders migration and Office 365 | Siegfried Jagott |
| 4:30pm | Experts Unplugged: Exchange Top Issues | Tony Redmond (chair) |
| Tuesday, April 1 | ||
| 9am | Eliminate the Compliance Regulatory Nightmare | J. Peter Bruzzese |
| 9am | Experts Unplugged: Public Folders and Site Mailboxes | Siegfried Jagott (chair) |
| 9am | How to remote control Office 365 with Azure | Martina Grom/Toni Pohl |
| 10:45am | Experts Unplugged: Transport and Hygiene | Jeff Guillet (chair)/ Brian Reid |
| 1:30pm | Experts Unplugged: Exchange Online migrations | Martina Grom (chair) |
| 3pm | Architect Exchange, smoking holes and long tails | Nicolas Blank |
| 3pm | Experts Unplugged: High Availability and Storage | Mike Crowley (chair) |
| 4:45pm | Experts Unplugged: Security End to End | Mike Crowley (chair) |
| 4:45pm | Make Role Based Access Control work for you | Bhargav Shukla |
| Wednesday, April 2 | ||
| 8:30am | Build a hybrid configuration in less than 75 minutes | Michael Van Horenbeeck |
| 8:30am | Exchange backup, restore, and disaster recovery | Jaap Wesselius |
| 8:30am | Experts Unplugged: Transport and Hygiene (repeat) | Jeff Guillet (chair)/ Brian Reid |
| 8:30am | Retention policies in the real world: Notes from the field | Tony Redmond |
| 10:45am | Five real-life scenarios of Office 365 in education | Jethro Seghers |
| 10:45am | Experts Unplugged: Exchange Deployment | Jeff Guillet |
| 1pm | Cross forest migrations: Free or 3rd party tools | Jason Sherry |
| 2:45pm | Exchange Online Archiving: Notes from the field | Michael Van Horenbeeck |
| 2:45pm | Experts Unplugged: Architecture – Management and Monitoring | Jeff Guillet (chair) |
| 2:45pm | Integration Exchange 2013 with Lync and SharePoint | Bhargav Shukla |
| 4:45pm | Experts Unplugged: Exchange Top Issues (repeat) | Tony Redmond |
| 4:45pm | Extending Data Loss Prevention for your business | Brian Reid |
| 4:45pm | Load balancing Exchange and Lync | Bhargav Shukla |
| 4:45pm | The UC Architects Live | Michael Van Horenbeeck (chair) |
Unfortunately Steve Goodman isn’t able to be with us at MEC due to unforeseen circumstances. I’m sure that his intended session covering off-boarding techniques for moving from Office 365 to on-premises Exchange 2013 would have been interesting, if not popular with those who are cloud-centric.
There are approximately 150 MVPs covering the Exchange and Office 365 specialities. I think 32 of the group will be at MEC (28 Exchange MVPs), including those listed above. All have strong opinions about technology. Be sure to ask then about your most difficult technical issues!
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