TechED North America 2012–Behind the Scenes

Anyone attending TechED North America this year would know it’s going to be a big one. Windows 8 Release Preview appeared yesterday, Windows Intune has a new release on the way, and there is a myriad of “2012” Server and System Center products either on the way, or just released.

This year I’ll again be participating in the Deployment Jeopardy game show. Last year was great, especially with the inclusion of Office Deployment questions, Johan and I held a commanding lead, only to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory during the final jeopardy question. The line-up is set to include the usual suspects, Mike Niehaus, Chris Jackson and Johan Arwidmark. This year, Office Compat guru Curtis Sawin enters the fray, which will certainly make things interesting on the Office front.

I hope you can make it, it’s always a bit of fun .

I’ll also be presenting a session, Office Deployment for the Elite, along with Jeremy Chapman. We’re planning a deep dive into various Office Deployment scenarios, including:

• Customization of user settings and Ribbon UI
• Lock down Office with Group Policy
• Office 365 Professional Plus image preparation with Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2012
• Leveraging user adoption resources in your migration project
• Dynamic role based Office deployment using Microsoft System Center 2012 Configuration Manager
• Office compatibility planning and remediation

As you can see, there is some fairly in-depth content in there, I like to break things up a bit. So what do we have in store for everyone this time? you’ll have to come along to the session to see, but here is a bit of a preview….

They say you should stick to what you know. As a pilot I’m always relating things back to aviation. The Fastrack team are always keen to be involved, so when someone suggested we look into what Office Deployment challenges might present whilst up in the air, I was certainly keen to investigate. Some of you might remember back at TechED Australia 2010, Paul Woods and I went flying over the gold coast to demonstrate what might happen as a result of a poorly planned Office deployment. You can check out the video here.

In order to raise it up a few notches, fellow Fastrack staffer Aaron and myself, once again took to the skies to step through some Office deployment scenarios, whilst pulling some G’s.

For those you can’t make it to Orlando this year, here is a behind the scenes look at what we went through, all in the name of TechED fun .

Enjoy…