Yesterday, the Dutch Networking User Group (NGN) organized the day filled with sessions on Windows Server 2008 R2, I blogged about earlier.

I delivered a  30-minute session on Active Directory features in Windows Server 2008 R2, followed by 30 minutes of Group Policy Goodness by Raymond Comvalius and rounding off the morning sessions together with 15 minutes of PowerShell geekery.

Begin of the day

The event was held in the Reehorst. This location features some great theater-style rooms with great acoustic. To get a feel of the place, the picture below shows the size of the room, the available seats and the general atmosphere:

In the picture above, you see Erwin Derksen preparing the presentation laptop.

Last-minute preparations

Tony and Daniel kicked off the day. During the break between their session and our sessions, Raymond and I prepared the demo machine and the presentation machine.

People who know me, or attended a previous presentation, recognize the laptop on the right as my day to day rig: The orange Windows 7 sticker gives it away. The laptop on the left is the presentation laptop, courtesy of Erwin Derksen.

We used two systems and the KVM switch from Tony and Daniel to switch between the two.

Presentation

I presented on new Active Directory features in Windows Server 2008 R2. I touched on the Active Directory Web Service, Administrative Center, PowerShell cmdlets, Recycle Bin and Best Practices Analyzer. I also mentioned Offline Domain Join and Managed Service Accounts. During this presentation I had a good time:

After 30 minutes I disappeared from stage to make room for Raymond Comvalius. After another 30 minutes I joined him on stage to take a look at PowerShell:

Questions & Answers

At the end of the day, all the speakers were invited on stage. Participants could fire questions to us. The whole Q&A was recorded and streamed live.
(You can watch it here. Q&A starts round the 25:10 mark)

While only one direct Active Directory question was asked (on compatibility between Active Directory Recycle Bin and Identity Management solutions), I did give a couple of pointers on other questions. I can honestly say we had some fun answering questions from the audience!