Tech Ed IT Pro 2008 is over. It was the last Tech Ed in Barcelona. I think it also was the  first Tech Ed following the new marketing strategy that Microsoft is using to reach its customers. In the earlier days Tech Ed used to be an educational event that educates users how to use the current technology at best. Presenters at Tech Ed were never allowed to talk too much about products that were not there yet or at least to be released within weeks after the conference.

This approach drastically changed at Tech Ed IT Pro 2008. Windows 7, Hyper-V v2  and Windows Server 2008 R2 were all over the place. There were sessions about Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V). All those products are not even available as a beta yet for the majority of the public.

At the same time Microsoft is trying to tell us that the actual release date of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 is far ahead. This left me wondering what is actually happening. Will the next European Tech Ed also be about Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 or is something different going on?

According to Steven's post from WinHEC last week, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 will be released in Q4 2009. Sumeeth Evans already posted that Microsoft has confirmed it will speed up the release of those products to an earlier date. Am I wrong when I think Q4 2009 means Q4 of the fiscal year 2009 that ends at July 30 for Microsoft?

This may reflect the new engineering strategy that Microsoft is using for those products according to Jason Leznek from the Windows Client product team. He claims that Microsoft waited a lot longer before it started providing information about the features in the upcoming products, because of lessons learned with technologies like WinFS that until now have never seen the day of light. Does the new engineering strategy also mean that the public beta cycle of Windows will be much later in the development cycle and therefore a lot shorter? I think I was not the only one who was surprised to see how stable and reliable most M3 based demo's on Windows were running.

Another observation that caught my eye was the fact that Windows Vista was almost absent at the conference. No success stories of enterprise implementations or best practices sessions were there to be found. I even heard of Windows Vista focused sessions being canceled during the conference. This left me wondering how dead Vista already is in the eyes of Microsoft's marketing department.

The future focus of the conference made one thing very clear: There will be no escape from PowerShell for any Windows administrator! If you have not already started learing PowerShell, you better start now. Even the good old Active Directory management tooling is  no revamped into a PowerShell based supertool. Hyper-V is standing next in line to get PowerShell managed.

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