Friday, September 22, 2006

Evangelism and Exchange 2007

Last night, I had a wonderul dinner with Arlindo Alves and Ilse Van Criekinge. Arlindo is a MS Belgium IT Pro evangelist, with a nice blog.Ilse is an outstanding trainer who (sadly) has just left Global Knowledge for Atos Origin. Ilse is also an Exchange guru, and is one of the founders of an Exchange user group called Pro-Exchange. The dinner was in a lovely resturant, with great food, good beer, and a view over a small lake. The weather too was great - we sat outside, drank beers and watched the sun go down (and talked and talked and talked).

Over dinner we chatted about all things Exchange 2007 and PowerShell. As many folks who know me will know, I've never been much of a fan of Exchange. It always felt bloated, convoluted and way too complex for a simple email system. Well, with Exchange 2007 two things have happened. First, MS has, in their roundabout way, admitted the complexity and has made great strides to reduce the complexity. While still on beta, Exchagne 2007 B2 is awesome. Secondly, the Exchange team have seen the light and have adopted PowerShell as their core admin tool, with the GUI being layered on top. Both a great approach and the fulfillment of the vision expressed by the PowerShell team for years. WOW!

In Arlindo's late night blog post, he notes my recent coversion to the Exchange way of thinking. And while he's right that Ilse is a great evangelist, I think I'd already begun the conversion process after a great talk with Vivek Sharma of the E2k7 team. Having said that, had Vivek not given me the push, Ilse would certainly been responsible. Her talk to day was good, and I'm looking forward even more to working with this fantastic product.

But whomever was responsible, I'm really looking forward to getting into E2k7 a lot more in coming months as it moves from Beta 2 into RTM. The ability to combine the output of the management shell with cool tools like power gadgets is going to rock the Exchange admin's world!

Exchange 2007 - I'm excited!!

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