Graham Jones, President of VANTUG (Vancouver Technology User Group) writes:
On May 24th Microsoft Canada held an event called Energize IT 2008. This event is now in its 3rd year and attracts an audience of 1200 – 1500 people. This year there was a Windows Home Server booth which I got the pleasure of running. There was huge interest and a steady stream of people throughout the whole day from 9:30 am to 5pm. I estimate that 250+ people visited the booth and although I went and got the traditional Microsoft lunch in a box I never actually got to eat it. Bathroom breaks were also something of a challenge. The setup was an HP MediaSmart Server with 1TB (2 x 512GB) of storage connected to a laptop via a Linksys router. Throughout the day I managed to demo most features of the product including adding and removing storage (external 80GB USB drive), add-ins (eg. whiist) and remote access to my WHS in Vancouver. Via remote access I demoed uploading and downloading files and access to my Vista desktop machine.
For part of the day I was joined by Steven Leonard (Product Manager from Redmond). Steven gave a talk on WHS in the afternoon and the room was packed. The photo of the booth shows Steven on the left in the Microsoft blue shirt. I am the person on the right with the grey beard and glasses apparently “catching flies”. The person in the red T-shirt with his back to us is MVP and UG Leader, Daniel Nerenberg from Montreal. There was a wide variety of questions covering people who were “sophisticated” users to people who had never seen WHS before. I had the usual challenge of trying to get people to stop thinking in terms of RAID when describing storage redundancy. As you might expect there was a lot of interest in PP1. At least the public beta is due soon and hopefully that will keep people happy for a while. All in all it was a very enjoyable and entertaining day, one that I would be happy to repeat anytime.
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