We are very fortunate that a great group of industry experts submitted session proposals for Exchange Connections 2014, which takes place at the Aria Hotel in Las Vegas on September 15-19. All the reports I hear indicate that the Aria offers much superior conference facilities to the Mandalay Bay, which has been the home of Connections for a decade and I'm looking forward to seeing what a modern top-of-the-range facility delivers.
Selecting the sessions to go into the agenda was difficult but I am happy that we have settled on a set that will deliver a massive amount of value to attendees. The group of speakers includes ten MVPs, three Microsoft Certified Masters, and six authors of books about Exchange. There is no doubting the credentials of the people we have lined up to speak.
We took a deliberate decision to base the agenda around the three major strands of Exchange that exist today: on-premises, hybrid, and cloud. This meant that we have less content that some might think we should have about topics like Lync, but we have taken this route because we believe that it will deliver the best independent conference for all things related to Exchange. Attempting to add more Lync or SharePoint content would have diluted "Exchange Connections."
I am particularly happy to welcome Paul Cunningham as an Exchange Connections speaker. His ExchangeServerPro.com site provides a huge amount of practical and useful content for Exchange administrators and it's great that Paul will travel from Brisbane, Australia to be with us at Connections. All of the other speakers have their own claim to fame, such as Paul Robichaux (steadily improving pilot), Bhargav Shukla (all you need to know about protocols), Jaap Wesseluis (Mr Practicality), Michael Van Hybrid (the name says it all), and Sigi Jagott, the man with the largest public folder implementation in the world.
It is great that we will have Tim McMichael and Wes Blalock from Microsoft's premier support organization with us as I'm sure that their knowledge of what it's like to fix Exchange in the real world will be intensely valuable. Tim was the top-rated speaker at the recent Microsoft Exchange Conference and his knowledge of Exchange high availability and Windows Failover Clustering is truly awesome.
The full speaker line-up is shown below. We are still tuning the actual times but you can take this as a good guide to what's going to happen.
Tuesday
|
Opening Keynote -The State of Exchange |
Tony Redmond |
|
Who Wears the Pants In Your Datacenter: Taming Managed Availability |
Paul Robichaux |
|
Office 365: Migrating Your Business to Office 365! |
Andy Malone |
|
Advanced troubleshooting procedures & tools for Exchange 2013 |
Andrew Higginbotham |
|
Exchange 2013 Disaster Recovery |
Michael Van Horenbeeck |
|
Microsoft Office 365: Security Deep Dive! |
Andy Malone |
|
MAPI/HTTP in depth |
Bhargav Shukla |
|
Just Like Lemmings: Mass Migration to Office 365
|
Paul Robichaux |
Wednesday
|
Managing Exchange Server Database Availability Groups
|
Paul Cunningham |
|
Exchange Hybrid Deployments |
Michael Van Horenbeeck |
|
Identity and Authentication management for Office 365 |
Nathan O’Bryan |
|
Managing and Monitoring Exchange using PowerShell
|
Sigi Jagott |
|
Deep Dive: Exchange 2013 and Lync 2013 Integration
|
Paul Robichaux |
|
Performance Counters You Never Knew and Why they are Important |
Nathan O’Bryan |
|
How You Can (Safely) Stop Backing Up Exchange |
Wes Blalock |
|
Exploring options for moving a small Exchange or Small Business Server environment to Office 365 or remaining on-premises |
Andrew Higginbotham |
|
Exchange 2013 Site Resilience |
Tim McMichael |
|
The Transport of Exchange 2013 - a detailed comparison to Exchange 2010 |
Sigi Jagott |
|
Role Based Access Control and YOU! |
Bhargav Shukla |
|
Help, I’m Hybrid! (How to Manage Hybrid Coexistence with Office 365) |
Wes Blalock |
Thursday
|
Autodiscover - What's the deal? |
Jaap Wesselius |
|
Build Your Own Super-Fast Exchange Lab for Under $2000! |
Jeff Guillet |
|
Making Exchange ActiveSync Work, Instead of "It Just Works" |
Paul Cunningham |
|
Managed Availability - What just happened to my server? |
Tim McMichael |
|
PowerShell tips & tricks for Exchange |
Jaap Wesselius |
|
Modern Public Folders - What to expect |
Sigi Jagott |
|
Ask the Experts: All you wanted to ask about Exchange – panel session followed by the Conference wrap-up |
Jeff Guillet/Tony Redmond |
We also have two 1-day workshops planned. These are "Deploying a hybrid Exchange environment (Michael Van Horenbeeck)" and " Microsoft Office 365: The Master Class (Andy Malone)." Both are indended to give people who need more information on these essential topics the time and opportunity to delve into the detail that just can't be offered in a standard 75-minute conference session.
If you have any interest whatsoever in Exchange, maybe you should come along to the Aria in Las Vegas for Exchange Connections 2014. See you there!
Follow Tony @12Knocksinna
