Technical Tracks

The Architecture track offers sessions focused on Architecture of technology and Architecture as a practice. Elements include the architectural process of translating business vision, intent, and strategy into effective technological change in the Enterprise; addressing the skills of creating, communicating, and improving the key tenets, principles, and models that describe the Enterprise's future state and enable its transformation, evolution, or migration.

Now more than ever, your business needs a quick means of getting the right information to the right people so that they can make smarter, more informed decisions. Microsoft’s Business Intelligence solutions enable you to do just this. The Business Intelligence track offers sessions covering how to integrate, analyze, and report on all of your corporate data easily using the Microsoft Business Intelligence platform, end-user tools, and analytics applications. Learn how to build custom, robust Business Intelligence solutions using Microsoft® SQL® Server 2005 and 2008 (Integration Services, Analysis Services and Reporting Services), Microsoft® Office PerformancePoint™ Server 2007 (Monitoring, Analysis and Planning) and the 2007 Office system (Microsoft® Office Excel®, Excel Services and Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server technologies) and how to easily manage them.

Every industry is defined by a set of standards, patterns and practices, and the software industry is no different. Your knowledge of the accepted standards and practices, and ability to apply the patterns appropriately, will set you apart from your peers and enable you to build better software, faster. The Development Practices track provides you the opportunity to focus on both widely accepted and newly emerging patterns and practices. Learn about software-plus-services, security best practices, parallel programming, and software testing. Improve your development skills by learning how to use software factories and how to apply software patterns. Build a more proficient development team with Application Lifecycle Management, Agile methodology, and development management best practices.

New to Tech·Ed, the IT Strategy and Business Alignment track focuses on the challenges IT Managers tackle daily, aligning the capabilities of IT with the needs of the business. Session speakers and interactive “peer” dialog sessions address the strengths of the Microsoft integrated platform and solutions designed to ease these challenges.

You and your customers share the same goal to deliver value by satisfying critical business needs efficiently. Customer relationship management (CRM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions from Microsoft Dynamics enable your company to be that kind of business. In turbulent economic times, managing organisations effectively, is vital to sustaining business growth. The opportunity to be successful through CRM and ERP solutions is more important now than ever. The Microsoft Dynamics track at Tech·Ed 2009 expands your technical knowledge of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM and ERP architecture, introduces accelerators for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 that can help you quickly increase functionality, and shows innovative and valuable new ways to integrate business intelligence and mobility platforms with your existing CRM and ERP systems. Technical subjects like SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) including Integration to third party software and web services and how it works within Dynamics AX 2009 will be discussed. Another ERP topic will be about the handling of large and complex implementation projects from a scalability perspective with Dynamics NAV. The Microsoft Dynamics track also introduces an agile xRM platform, designed for rapidly building and deploying custom internal business applications. This track provides the tools and information to create a 360-degree view of your customers, using a highly flexible CRM solution that can adapt, grow, and scale with growing business needs.

The Office and SharePoint® track provides IT professionals and developers with a deep technical arsenal for the 2007 Microsoft® Office system and with a glimpse into the next wave of Office and SharePoint. Come and learn from industry experts the best practices and advice on how to architect, design, deploy, and implement world-class solutions built on the Office and SharePoint platform technologies. Be prepared to learn more about the next wave of innovations while also going deep into 2007 Office system products and technologies such as SharePoint Server 2007, Office Enterprise, Open XML File Formats, InfoPath® 2007, SharePoint Designer, Project Server 2007, and SharePoint Online. As an IT professional, learn about Office server and client applications with sessions covering security, deployment, management, customization, and administration. As a developer, learn how to take your ASP.NET expertise to the fast-growing SharePoint ecosystem, how to craft the next generation of “Office Business Applications” and about the latest techniques for creating applications involving Microsoft Office, composition, collaboration, software-plus-services, VOIP, Open XML, Silverlight™, and more!

organisations of all sizes use technology to automate, manage, and improve business processes, and many are using SOA to create a more flexible set of IT assets. Designing, building, deploying, and managing these distributed applications can be difficult and complex. There are a range of capabilities, products, and technologies that you will need to understand in order to do your job effectively. The SOA and Business Processes track helps to explain these choices, give you concrete approaches to designing distributed applications particularly around loosely coupled service oriented architectures, and to show you the Microsoft products and technologies that you will use to develop and manage these systems. See products such as Microsoft® BizTalk® Server 2009, .NET LOB Adapters and the Microsoft® .NET Framework 3.5, in addition to some major new technologies that are in development and soon to be released.

With today’s IT budget constraints, virtualization enables you to maximize your current hardware investments and provide increased services. The Virtualization track covers all of Virtualization from the desktop to the datacenter. Learn about Microsoft’s virtualization strategy, as well as our current solutions: Windows Server® Hyper-V, Microsoft® Hyper-V™ Server, App-V, MED-V, System Center Virtual Machine Manager, and Terminal Services (Remote Desktop Services). Sessions include real-world lessons from both Microsoft and industry experts. Come learn all about the present and future of Virtualization at Microsoft.

The Windows Client track has everything you need to know about adoption, deployment, management, and virtualization of the Windows® Desktop Environment; including a technical introduction into Windows 7 and Microsoft® Internet Explorer® 8. Come learn best practices and hear about the advancements in the Windows Client technologies which will help you manage and accelerate your desktop deployment efforts. Get real-world guidance from our industry experts via sessions that span client-side development, readying applications for your OS roll-out, deployment tools and technologies, virtualization, and much more.

The basis of any strong datacenter now and for the future starts with the core operation system. The Windows Server® family of products provides you with the best solution to build your IT infrastructure for any size organisation. From the Essential Server Solutions to Windows Server 2008 R2, the Windows Server track shows you the solutions and set of technologies to ensure success.