On October 31st, the NGN – a Dutch society for IT professionals – held its 3rd Exchange themed event, this time at The Reehorst in Ede (NL). Because of the recently released Exchange 2013 and all the news and related questions, we planned for a whole day of sessions and it was nice to see the turn up was nearly 100 IT professionals.

Since all people would still be on pre-2013 versions of Exchange, I figured a presentation using real-world Exchange 2010 Tips and Tricks might be more appropriate. I was glad a quick poll amongst the attendees showed a significant increase in Exchange 2010 deployments (around 80%) when compared to last year’s event, but as expected there’s still some Exchange 2007 and few Exchange 2003 out there.

I decided to stick with two deep-dive topics, which were Message Trackings Logs and Cmdlet Extension Agents. On those topics I went from basics to more advanced examples, hoping it would ignite people with no experience and people with experience could still pick up a thing or two.I’m still waiting for evaluation results, the only way to get feedback from these sessions apart from the occasional e-mail or tweet.

(picture by Dave Stork)

You can find my presentation here (partially Dutch) and the accompanying sample script on Message Tracking Logs here and the one on Cmdlet Extension Agents here (script); the ScriptingAgent.xml file can be downloaded here.

As always, these events are also a time to catch up with fellow Exchange people and discuss topics with attendees during the breaks. There were even Exchange fellows present who didn’t have a session, like Johan Veldhuis (MVP) and Maarten Piederiet (MCM); they did join in on the Q&A Panel.

The sessions and speakers were:

• Introduction (Jaap Wesselius, MVP)
• Building with Exchange 2013: Architecture (Dave Stork)
• Exchange and Virtualisation (Jetze Mellema)
• Exchange 2010 Tips & Tricks (Ashley Flentge, MCM & Michel de Rooij)
• Exchange 2013 Coexistence and Migrations (Kay Sellenrode, MCM and MCA)
• Exchange and Load Balancing (Jetze Mellema)
• Q&A Panel

The NGN published all presentations in a single ZIP file which can be downloaded here. Unfortunately, NGN didn’t record the sessions so I can’t share those with you. They did record the Q&A Panel session; you can view it here (in Dutch):

PS: When you see references to “exchangedag”, like in the Twitter hashtag, you need to know “dag” means day in Dutch; it’s no form of professional deformation.