TechEd 2012 Conference News

TechEd Hands-On Traning

More than 10,000 developers, administrators and IT pros gathered at the sold-out Microsoft TechEd North America 2012 conference at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Fla., where Microsoft trained, tested, educated and sometimes entertained the enormous crowds at the annual event. Here's a look at some of the announcements from the show.

MDT 2012

Microsoft revealed details of the next version of MDT 2012, the company's deployment toolkit for delivering Windows installations. Among the new features coming in SP1 will be a drag-and-drop wizard designer for building user-driven installations. The update is set to ship along with Windows 8, which is currently rumored to be October. Redmond also unveiled the Advanced Group Policy Management (AGPM) 4.0 Service Pack 1 beta and Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset (DaRT) 8 release candidate. Both new tools support the Windows 8 Release Preview.

MigrationWiz Superhero

With migration tools of its own is BitTitan, a company founded by former Microsofters. This week the Seattle-based company announced that its flagship MigrationWiz cloud-based migration tool for platform conversion now supports Lotus Notes. CTO Dominic Pouzin said that IBM's venerable email and communication platform is "an old system that people will want to migrate from and move to a more modern system." The browser-based tool now features a streamlined interface, and it just might turn IT administrators into superheroes like the one lurking around the company's booth.

Citrix Receiver

Citrix was demonstrating a Metro-style version of the Citrix Receiver, a client for connecting handheld devices to Xen apps running on enterprise servers. Unveiled as a beta at Citrix Synergy 2012 last month, the x64 app joins a long list of mobile clients that includes Android and iOS (shown).

Lieberman Ledge

If you're ever faced with talking someone down from a ledge, it might be handy to know some Mandarin Chinese, or some French, German and Portuguese. Those are among the new languages supported by the latest Lieberman Identity Management and Enterprise Security suite, which also gathers and presents business intelligence in new, easy-to-read dashboards. CEO Philip Lieberman said that among the suite's chief benefits is its ability to track access patterns of sensitive data. "One use case is as a forensics tool to zero in on user activity over a period of time," he said, and claimed to count the U.S. Department of Defense among his customers.

X-IO Epic

Making it to the final round of the coveted Best of TechEd awards for 2012 was Hyper ISE storage array from high-performance storage maker X-IO. "When we were setting up our equipment, Microsoft asked us to try to break 12 GB/s transfer rate," said Rick Nelson, X-IO's vice president of marketing, of the 100 TB Fibre Channel array that was half-populated with data. "But we got it to 16 GB/s," he said

My Varonis

Dropbox might be fine for small business and casual use, but as the number of users within a corporation grows, it becomes impossible to know who's sharing what with whom. Offering a solution is Varonis and its DatAnywhere, which provides a cloud-based interface to all of a company's repositories, including SharePoint servers, Windows and Unix file servers, NAS devices and Exchange mailboxes and public folders. "We also identify and involve the data owners," said David Gibson, vice president of marketing. "Because the owners know the data best. IT's job is to handle the technology infrastructure, not the data."