Highlights from Day 2 included ISA MVP Amy Babinchak delivering a great presentation to a packed room on Common ISA Server 2004 SMB Scenarios.  ISA is such a great fit for SMB that I hope Microsoft comes out with a better alternative if they cut it out of SBS 2008. 

Also, Dana Epp demo’d his SMB-focused security offerings for dual-factor authentication – very interesting!  One example of a useful scenario was for IT service providers to use AuthAnvil and the security tokens as an effective process to easily administer domain admin-level access to clients’ networks (for employees and subcontractors), instead of having to change all the passwords whenever staff changes.   

Among others, Day 3 had a really informative session on Leveraging Virtualization.  The quality of the presentation was really enhanced by the presenter demonstrating the technologies and walking through actual scenarios, as opposed to working with just a PowerPoint deck.  Virtualization is truly a white-hot technology and already has many real-world applications in SMB.   

All in all, SMB Nation 2007 was an excellent conference with qualified and competent presenters who spoke to the business and technology issues facing the SMB IT Service Provider.  The opportunity to network with industry peers, user group leaders, Microsoft MVPs, executive-level vendor contacts, Microsoft Partner program employees, and others always brings a wealth of perspective, industry vision, and business value that continue to reward with benefits as time goes on.   

Thank you SMB Nation, Dana, Arlin, and all those who participated in making this conference worth-while!

That’s what another friend and client of mine from Louisiana tells me is the way of life in the southern state.  And Jeff Middleton, recognized as an expert in disaster recovery and almost as well known for his parties, might be Louisiana’s official culture representative to the SMB IT community.   

Here are a couple of pics from the party he threw on the second night of SMB Nation 2007 conference.  The band was amazing, as the guitarist jammed out whaling sax solos, keyboard runs, and even trombone and trumpet parts on an electronic instrument that looked like a guitar.

SMB Nation is the original and largest SMB channel partner-focused conference, and I’ve been looking forward to it and this trip for months!  Set on the Microsoft campus headquarters in Redmond, Washington, it has state of the art facilities, beautiful grounds, and believe it or not, great food!  Surrounded by around 600 other IT solution providers, many industry-leading vendors, and high-level Microsoft employees focused on the channel is quite an experience!   

I have had the pleasure of putting faces to names and talking shop face-to-face with big names in the SMB IT community, such as Mark Crall, Susan Bradley, Dana Epp, Karl Palachuk, Amy Babinchak, Jeff Middleton, Eric Ligman, and others. 

Today I attended sessions on the importance of mission/ vision/ value and why I am in business, MS CRM features and capabilities, and using virtualization to recover servers.  The last one was an amazing presentation, demo’ing live the ability to restore a crashed SBS Server to a virtual machine… running on a laptop!  Using imaging (Shadow Protect) and virtualization (both Virtual PC and VM Ware), the client could then use it temporarily as the server until replacement server hardware was available, at which point the process would be reversed to move it back.   

Out of all the experiences that these tech conferences offer, the best value by far is the networking with peers and leaders in the SMB IT community.  As they say, it’s not what you know.  It’s who you know.