NE Bytes is born

Andrew Westgarth and Jo Noble have brought a new Microsoft Technology user group to the North East with the launch of NE Bytes. The launch event was held on Wednesday 20^th January and I went along to the event to see what it was all about.

NE Bytes revolves around both IT Developers and IT Professionals in the North East who use Microsoft Technologies in their day-to-day work and it also showcases up and coming software in the Microsoft suite of products.

For a launch event, it was great to see the number of people who attended. Over 90 people and the 3 speakers (Steve Smith, Mike Taulty and James O’ Neill) were present.

Highlights and features of Microsoft Office SharePoint 2010
The first session of the evening was given by Steve Smith, a SharePoint MVP and Director of Combined Knowledge (A specialist SharePoint training consultancy). Steve talked about some of the new features in the up and coming release of SharePoint. He covered topics such as Metadata management model, Records management, Records routing, The Ribbon, Office integration, Migration options, Architecture and the new layout of the software.

Silverlight – 2 Years, 4 versions and where are we now?
Mike Taulty who currently works in the Developer and Platform Group at Microsoft UK gave the second session of the evening. Mike talked about Microsoft’s UX technology for RIAs and covered what is available in Silverlight such as various User Interface components; he also demonstrated what is available in the new Silverlight release, Silverlight 4 which is currently in Beta.

Hyper-V with James O’Neill
The third session of the evening was given by James O’ Neill who works on the Evangelist Team. He covered the Hyper-V virtualisation technology which is bundled with Server 2008, including the improvements which were released in Server 2008 R2. He also demonstrated System Center Virtual machine Manager and managing virtualised systems using Windows PowerShell.

September VBUG and Too Far North

September's VBUG event was held on Wednesday 23rd at Newcastle University organised by Andrew Westgarth and Jo Noble, with guest speakers Richard Diver and Dr Dan Oliver from Microsoft giving informative talks about Performance and the Dynmic Desktop Experience.

Alexandria Ball and Sarah Melrose, two of the Microsoft Technet marketing girls also attended the event whilst on thier little road trip from Reading in London.

Part 1: Richard Diver - Performance Monitoring and Analysis

A Premier Field Engineer with 10 years experience implementing and supporting a range of Microsoft technologies, specialising in Active Directory, Server Platform and Virtualisation.

Richard Diver kicked off the event by asking for introductions from each attendee and then he went into his talk about Performance Monitoring and Analysis for proactive and reactive support, server baselining and capacity planning. Richard talked about a free tool that comes in all current versions of Windows called Perfmon. He gave a couple of quick demos and also went into other tools called Resource Monitor (Win 7) Reliability Monitor (Win 7), PSR (Problem Steps Recorder) and SysInternals.

Richard also gave a couple of examples on how to make the experience of XP performance monitoring better, more details can be found in the following Microsoft KB articles:

• KB283110
• KB300884
• KB281884

Part 2: Dr Dan Oliver - The Dynamic Desktop Experience

A Pre Sales Architect within Microsoft UK’s Speciality Technology Unit with some 14 years’ experience of Microsoft-based solutions primarily in the virtualization and systems management fields.

Unfortunatly I don't have much to blog about regarding Dan's talk however during his talk he went into:

• Desktop Optimization pack
• System Center
• Bringing down costs, doing more with less
• Management approval for Group Policies
• On Demand Apps
• User State Migration Tool

Notes:

There were meant to be three speakers for this event however Conrad Sidey (Session: Novell and Lotus Notes - Migrating to Microsoft), couldn't make it.


Following the VBUG event I visited the Head of Steam opposite Central Station. Soul Technique were playing as part of the Too Far North set of gigs however I managed to arrive just as Ruth and the gang were finishing their last song of the set. Iam pleased I went down when I did though as after Soul Technique had finished another band called Saint and the Cynics played the next slot and I have to say considering this was the first time I'd seen them play, I'd definatly go elsewhere to see them again. Other bands which played the gig included Peculiar Disco Moves and Black Marcs