Today I want to write more in detail about the Unified Communications (UC) track. All the sessions in this track are going to be on June 14^th. If you closely look at the session titles in this track (http://www.techmela.com/tec_agenda.htm ) you can see that many of those technology areas were addressed under messaging track in previous year's TechEd. So what is different this year? Unified Communications (UC) is Microsoft's new strategy to build and release various software (such as e-mail, IM, VOIP etc.) related to communications to help our customers better collaborate. More details on UC can be found here.

The various products and technologies discussed in this track include hosted conferencing, Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, Exchange Server 2007 and Exchange Hosted Service. The speakers in this track are my friends and colleagues from the technical specialists' team and consulting services division. They are going to share their field experiences and deep technical knowledge through these sessions. So this track is a must for anyone who is investing their career in UC.

TechMela is well beyond the various tracks where typical sessions are delivered as there will be lots of other things (networking with the community, scenario showcase, hands on labs etc.) happening outside the session halls. That said I can't miss talking about the various tracks and its contents. Day 1 and day 2 will have two tracks each and on day 3 there will be three tracks targeted @ IT Professionals. The various tracks are...

Day 1 – Windows OS, Unified Communications

Day 2 – Infrastructure Management, Office System (some of the sessions here make sense to developers as well)

Day 3 – Security, Mobile Platform (listed under MEDC), Office System Applications (some of the sessions here make sense to developers as well)

Detailed sessions listing under each track can be found here.

In my next blog post I am going to talk more in detail about Unified Communications track

Even for demo purpose I prefer Virtual Server than Virtual PC because of performance reasons. While running multiple virtual machines, virtual server gives better performance due to its multithreading capabilities.

This time there is no TechEd in India. No MEDC and ITPC as well. But we are going to have this mega event called Tech.Mela which will be a fusion of all these events plus more. Here is the home page of the event www.techmela.com

I'm so excited about this event just because of the sheer number of technical sessions happening in the "IT Professional" track. Across seven tracks in three days approximately 42 sessions would be delivered. This is a huge change compared to previous years. In my next post I will talk more about the tracks and sessions.

The beta 3 of Windows Server code named Longhorn is impressive in many ways. So far it's found to be pretty stable and I upgraded one of my servers running lots of virtual machines to Longhorn. One of the interesting things I found out today was the copy/paste feature in terminal server. While connected to a Longhorn server over Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) one can now copy and paste files between the client and server machines. This is going to be extremely useful to administrators who remotely manage Windows servers