Thank you very much for registering to attend Essentials Workshop: Become an Exchange 2010 Maestro in Boston. We’ve been working on the content and labs for this event for the last six months and are really looking forward to sharing the product of that effort with you. This note is to give you a heads-up about some aspects of the event so that you are fully prepared to extract maximum value over the three days that we’ll be spending together.

Content
We have lots to talk about when it comes to Exchange 2010, including the changes and updates that Microsoft introduced in Service Pack 1 (SP1). We have a compelling agenda that hits all the major areas of interest when it comes to designing fully functional Exchange 2010 environments, but we apologize up front if we don’t cover a specific point that’s of interest to you. The simple truth is that we have enough content to last two weeks – but who wants to spend two weeks listening to us, especially with the warped sense of humor that we sometimes demonstrate!

Even though Tony worked for HP and has an interest in printer inks, we don’t believe in killing masses of trees to print everything off – nor do we want you to run up big FedEx bills to ship heavy printouts home. We will provide you with access to PDF versions of all of the PowerPoint decks that we use through a password-protected web site. You’ll receive the password and details of the web site at the seminar. Clearly this material is protected by copyright so we’d appreciate if you don’t share it with others.

Labs
We have assigned between two and three hours of labs daily. The labs are designed to complement the lecture content and reinforce the information that we present. The virtual servers used in the labs are designed to run on VMware V7.1 on a high-end laptop. We recommend a laptop running 64-bit Windows 7 (any particular version) with at least 8GB of memory.

You’ll probably need a small amount of free space on your system disk but this shouldn’t be a problem given the size of the whopping disks installed into laptops these days.The virtual machines used for the labs will be provided to you on an external drive that you are free to take away after the event to use for further testing. Please make sure that you come with a suitable laptop as you will not be able to participate in the labs otherwise. We will not have extra machines available at the event.

Venue
The workshop is being held at the Doubletree Guest Suites Boston (Directions).  Once you’re at the hotel, follow the signs to the Become an Exchange 2010 Maestro workshop to find the seminar room. We should be pretty obvious unless someone like the Lotus Notes development team infiltrates the event. The seminar room will be open from 8AM on the first day to 7PM daily. Please don’t come down to the seminar room the day before the event as you’ll probably be appalled at the language we use as we work through the inevitable glitches that always seem to occur when you set up a room for an event like this.

Internet access
You’ll have wireless access to the Internet in the seminar room during the seminar and can use this to access essential information such as the presentation material. We’d like you to stay focused while the presentations and labs are in session and would appreciate if you could make a big effort to avoid the lure of the net and not check email, update your Facebook status, create new LinkedIn connections, trade on eBay, or manage your stock portfolio when we are speaking. If you do, you run the risk of being shamed publicly as Paul has a wicked way of bringing offenders to the attention of the entire seminar.

Customer Service
Please send email to subs@windowsitpro.com or call 800-793-5697 if you need help with something before you arrive in Boston or if you have any other questions that we need to answer. If you need anything while you’re at the event, you can contact the on-site Windows IT Pro representative and they’ll do their best to help.

Again, thank you for registering to attend Essentials Workshop: Become an Exchange 2010 Maestro in Boston. We promise we will do our best to communicate as much information as we can over the three days.

We look forward to seeing you,

Paul Robichaux (wishing he was salmon fishing in Alaska) http://www.robichaux.net/blog/

Tony Redmond (washed up HP executive and general dabbler in Exchange) https://thoughtsofanidlemind.wordpress.com/

Brian Desmond (Lab Master and general Technical Guru) http://briandesmond.com/