The blog..

As i am guessing one could see from the title of this post.. Pubforum is over.. and whow what a feeling.. Pubforum provided for me a great experience of meeting peers in the SBC community, coming together across borders and job descriptions. It didnt matter if you were German, Danish or Estonian.. you were there.. you were contributing and that was good enough for everyone. Everyone was open, willing to learn and teach, sharing experiences and techniques.

The presenters did an extraordinary job presenting their techniques, their tools, or the company products, no sales-nonse .. just pure technical sessions done by the technicians who work with the tools and products every day.

I will try to go over a few of my experiences from the Presentations:

Day 1:

Pubforum Olympics sponsored by Appsense.
The Pubforum olympics was a great thing, it was an event that ran over the entire Pubforum with different challenges each day and it gave us all a little more to discuss and talk about. The Challenges included tasks like “Hosting Microsoft Project in a server farm, obeying EULA and being accessible only in business hours”, “Smallest possible Profile build” and others like “name all registry keys which can be used to ‘autorun’ an application at startup”.

Simon Frost – “What has Citrix been doing since the last pubforum”?
Simon did a presentation about what has happened since the last pubforum, which must have been great for everyone but me, since this was sadly only my first. However there were alot of good stuff i will name a few of the topics.
-Support for W2k3-R2 ADFS
-Citrix Access Essentials 1.5 - Simon mentioned some of the new features in 1.5 and also told that CAE will have a much faster development cycle than CPS 4.0. So alot of stuff coming in this area and seems to be an area that Citrix has a large amount of focus on.
-Teros a firewall for the netscaler
-MOM 2005 Management pack – its here ..
-Password Manager 4.1
-New tools: Medevac, automatic farm tuner(mainly focused at large farms)
-The blackhole hotfix(ctx108645)
-Tarpon – Mentioned briefly but i am guessing we will have to wait for next NDA-event with more information on this.

Bill Gleeson – Scapa Technologies
Bill Gleeson from Scapa Technologies did a good presentation and demonstration of their products. Scapa Technologies specialize in Performance measuring, diagnostics and testing. They provide a product line which can simulate and measure tasks from a client pc, giving customers the ability to measure and know what the client is experiencing during heavy load or other situations that can be hard to measure or troubleshoot. Scapa Technologies were also kind enough to host an evening event for socializing and ofcourse a couple of well diserved belgium beers.

Walter Weinfurter – Microsoft EMEA “A look under the hood of the new Virtual products”
Walter did a great and in depth demonstration of Virtual Server and the administration of the machines. It seems the virtual products have come along way, but it is still hard for me to compare the products as i dont see many customers using GSX from VMware or Virtual Server, from my experience the main focus at the moment is on the ESX technologies, but from what Walter showed Microsoft is surely investing time and money into their virtual products, so i am guessing we will see them competing with ESX in the near future.. somehow.

When the recording of sessions was turned off, Walter did a demonstration of the Longhorn terminal Services, we talked about the gateway and the new “seamless application”-features.. Seems like Terminal Services are moving towards providing some of what Citrix is providing for us now, however they do it in their own way, so as i see it Terminal Services and Citrix products will continue to compliment each other and solve different challenges. But it was great to get a glimpse of the future with a Microsoft Support Engineer behind the wheel.

Day 2:

Simon Frost – “How does Presentation Server Work?”
Simon did an in depth presentation of Presentation Server under the hood, sadly i had to attend work issues at home so i was not able to follow the first 2 presentations too closely, but i am definately looking forward to the publishing of the Presentation.

Marc Killduff - Metaframe troubleshooting case studies
Marc presented case studies fresh from the Citrix support team, showing us exactly what goes on when they are troubleshooting and working with an issue in his team. It was a great look into the techniques for troubleshooting, but sadly i was forced to run to and from the session and admittedly i lost track at some point, it was hardcore technical stuff.

Stefan Vermeulen and Gavan Smythe – “Everything you ever wanted to know about printing in terminal service environmetns.”
These guys know a thing or two about printing issues. Stefan and Gavan gave a great in depth presentation of problems, workarounds and Gavan went into detail with how he solves issues at his customers. Presenting how he managed to script retaining printer settings, default printers and similar stuff. Gavan and Stefan promised to release the scripts to the community when i find the url i will cross-link it here.

Toby Coleridge – WISP Web Interface / SharePoint integration
Toby did a nice presentation of WISP and it looks really great adding the possibility of chosing whether to open documents, pictures or similar on your local machine or through published applications. The Webinterface intregration should also work on even the small version of SharePoint, so maybe this is a way to go for people who want just a little more from their webinterface

Andreas Schulze - Real life examples of designing print solutions for SBC and also a look into ThinPrint.
Andreas is an independant SBC consultant from Germany, he shared his experiences on with ThinkPrint to solve some of the most common issues in printing.

Kobie Crawford – Netscaler architecture
Kobie swung by and did a great presentation of the ‘still new’ Netscaler products, and the architecture of the solutions. Kobie is from the original netscalers so he shared alot of information and answered any questions we had.

Dr. Bernhard Tritsch – “Can i pimp my terminal servers by migrating to 64-bit Windows”
Bernhard “Benny” Tritsch did a great and indepth presentation of his findings while doing performance tests of Windows 32-bit and 64-bit. There were some very interesting findings and for one the whitepapers from MS and Citrix might have to be up for adjustment or atleast in real life situations it might be wise to do your own tests or study Bernhard Tritsch and Visionapp’s findings.
Some of the key findings and Bernhards conclusion seemed to be that there might not be direct “pimpage” from converting your terminals to 64-bit as there is an increased memory usage and using 32-bit applications on 64-bit systems will not improve performance. However, i have to agree that 64-bit is here to stay we all have to get started on changing our scripts, procedures and such to match the coming multi-platform era.

Day 3:

Alex Danilychev – “Ishadow – under the hood”
Alex went first from the morning going through the Ishadow product, and what lies beneath.. Awesome features and great user interface.. i surely hope i will be able to optain myself a copy.
Ishadow provides the missing link between Terminal Services and what an administrator needs to have the objective view of farms, applications and servers. Great product will have to look into this produkt.

Sander Hofman – Wisdom “The Windows maintainance software”
WISDOM seems to provide a great way to administration and maintain windows software on machines and provides great administration options. I signed up for a trial, i will try to look more into this when i get some time.

Asaf Ganot – Cockpit 3.6
Asaf did a great presentation of Cockpit which is a completely new world to me, he explained in depth how the product works but also a few options for tweaking and optimizing. Cockpit might be a platform worth looking into it is also on my to-research-list.

Log-in Consultants – “SBC recipes straight from the Log-in kitchen”
These guys are good, the Log-in consultants showed how they do scripting. They have gone to great lengths to make their scripting perfekt. They showed several developed tools to help in process, publishing apps from commandline and much more. They also promised to share these scripts on their website http://www.loginconsultants.nl/ so go look around, alot fo great tools and scripts.. great for inspiration and really shows how unattending your administrative tasks can be done.
Roger Jansson  - Tricerat Simplify Suite & Screwdrivers v4 Core and beyond.
Roger presented a suite from Tricerat called simplify, it is in many ways a direct competitor to Citrix and also adds administration benefits on Terminal Services, on top of all this they have their own new printer driver to solve all our printing issues and also nifty things like creating printers on the fly inside sessions to reflect the local client. Many cool things, also a product on my to-research list.

Day 4: Last day

Sadly due to something with an alarm clock, an awesome party and Champagne flowing in endless cascades.. i missed the first Presentation on day 4.. but luckily it was a taped presentation by Doug Brown talking about his Mythology in a Box 4.0(MIAB). So looking forward to the video release.. please soon Mr. Conti

Sander Hofman - showing Powerfuse
Sander Hofman did a presentation of powerfuse, alot of great things, but in my situation the product is often too expensive for the solutions or the customers does not seem to have the need, or willingness to pay so it is not that interesting for me, however there are alot of great stuff in this product and alot of good to find if you are willing to pay and have the needs.

Jack Chote – “Server Deployment”
Jack did a great and deep technical presentation of his Server deployment “best practice” what to do, why, and what to be aware of. Alot of good and useful information and alot of links to tools and whitepapers to help us all along the way to ease our server deployments.

Chip PC – Excalibur Global TC Management
Chip pc, some of you might have heard about these guys, they have a line of products awesome for many purposes like their JackPC a Think client made for the purpose of being build into the wall.. leaving only mini jack, Video-out, and USB for mouse and keyboard. If this is not the best solution for classrooms or places haunted by break-ins i dont know what is. Along with their great products they made a demonstration of their Excalibur management tool, and it looks great. A great AD-look’n'feel easy to get into and it makes it easy to administrate and keep an overview of what have happened on the clients. Great product from what i saw, i hope i will get a chance to work with these guys in the future.

This was a quick run-through of some of the topics from PubForum Brussels.. but as i mentioned in the beginning of this post, Pubforum is much more than the sessions and this was put in stone throughout the event by the happenings and experiences, from the Group-photos to the Pubforum Olympics and the Log-in hosted Carting event. This event was most of all about making friends, spending time with colleagues in the business you didnt know and social networking.

It was a great 4 days.

A special thanx to Pubforum team: Alex Yushchenko, Brian Smyth, Alex Danilychev. All the Presenters and sponsors for the great presentations and keeping us all well fed, not thirsty and up to date on what is hot in the SBC-world today. Log-in Consultants for a great carting event, Ruben Giacotto this was a great event and did the last bit to get everyone together. And last but not least, my pubforum olympics team “We have been framed”: Chris Marks, Simon Frost, Toby Coleridge, Stefan Vermeulen, Nick Daniels and Marc Killduff – Appreciate you guys showing me how this thing is done. .