As I have posted on before, Paul Robichaux and I will be leading two three-day Exchange 2010 SP1 training events in the Doubletree Guest Suites in Boston (October 13-15) and at the Sheraton Anaheim Hotel (October 18-20). I guess those who attend the latter event can duck out to visit Disneyland before, after, or during the event if it all gets too onerous or our jokes fall flat. Logistics and other information about the events is available from Exchange 2010 Maestro seminars.

Paul and myself are backed up by Brian Desmond, another Exchange MVP, who is taking care of the labs and making sure that they are compelling, interesting, in-depth, and challenging. In fact, when you think about it, Brian probably has the hardest job of anyone on the team.

It’s all very well agreeing to speak at a training event. However, the hard work begins when you start to flesh out the agenda with real content. No one wants to duplicate what has gone before – it would be easy to recycle some of the content presented by Microsoft and others at recent TechEd events, and looking at some of the presentations that are floating around the Internet, a fair amount of cut and paste (all done in the best possible taste) occurs as people build presentations about Exchange 2010. Our aim is to provide a distinct and practical insight into Exchange 2010 SP1 through a series of talks covering the critical parts of the product with the learning reinforced through the labs referred to above. You can’t accomplish what we want to do without doing a whole heap of work up front to decide what topics to cover, build the material, check it out, link it with labs, and make sure that Microsoft doesn’t change anything as they drive to complete the SP1 code (very soon now).

Over the last two weeks, I have been working on three sessions in particular: Exchange 2010 architecture, Exchange 2010 Compliance, and the Exchange 2010 Store and High Availability story. The first session is the warm up for the event and didn’t cause me too many problems. The issue I face with the other two is deciding what’s important and what can be left out to get a deck down to a reasonable size, one that can be delivered in two hours or so. For example, my current draft for the Store session extends to some 1o2 slides and that’s just too many – yet there’s lots to talk about in this particular area and you could make a case that a complete three-day seminar could be done on the topic. So more work has to be done, more thinking has to happen, and a few late nights are still required to whip things into shape.

I imagine that Paul is going through the same process. Of course, he’d say that he is spending far too much time correcting all the errors in my Exchange 2010 book where he serves as the technical editor for the publication. In any case, we will soon have the material sorted out and be ready to deliver, and that’s when the real fun will start.

Looking forward to Boston and LA – Tony

If you can’t make the seminars, you might still consider buying my Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Inside Out book… just to check whether Paul really did an excellent job as the technical editor!