Vista/Exchange/Office Oh My!

OK I don't often say a lot of positive things about Microsoft, but that isn't to say I can't. Attended the local Launch Across America event hosted by MS to demonstrate their offerings with Exchange 2007, Office 2007 and Vista.

Now thankfully I had coworkers with me and we got to also enjoy some good team building and stuff, but really for me it was just a chance to see how MS could spin things for me and what type of direction they're heading and what they espouse to admins out there. Let's face it, knowing what your client base is being told by the vendor is important.

Vista and Office 2007 were as they were in the betas. Promising, a few quirks, and of course some annoyances (urgh still not sold on the UAC model). More interesting to me at least were the inclusions of PowerShell (formerly Monad) and the simplification in Exchange 2007. The improvements in deployment options and the increase of rights to user is also a positive step in my view. As an added bonus, Free copy of Office 2007 :) Now of course I'm not all about taking the plunge all the way for my home systems (just yet) so this will be used for testing within my VMWare lab. So, good presentation, good idea of direction of MS and where they see business going. Now to see how that plays out here in Hawaii.