With a wide range of learning opportunities available at TechEd, the wealth of technology education offered can be a lot to take in. Technical Tracks help you navigate the sessions and labs best suited to your learning needs and interests.
The delivery of IT services is undergoing a transformation due to industry trends toward cloud computing and the demand for application availability across many devices. These trends are fueling the need for solutions that seamlessly integrate the broad capabilities of the Microsoft Cloud OS platform to address evolving business scenarios. To support this, the traditional datacenter will transform to provide more agile services that offer capacity more reliably, more quickly based on demand, and more efficiently utilizing shared resources. In the Architecture & Trustworthy Computing track, industry leaders share their best practices and logical building blocks for this evolution that integrate core platform capabilities that architects can use to optimize their work, including security best practices and software testing. Sessions in this track provide valuable reusable patterns around the skills of creating, communicating, and improving architectural artifacts for building future state and enabling the Microsoft Cloud OS vision. Learn how to achieve your business goals while protecting your assets and infrastructure, with guidance and technical detail on Microsoft Forefront products, identity-based technologies, Windows security technologies, and more.
The technologies highlighted in this track include:Improve your technical and professional skills in the development, support, and implementation of Microsoft Business Intelligence and analytical solutions, and learn how to seamlessly run a mission-critical environment with the Microsoft SQL Server data platform. The Data Platform & Business Intelligence track offers the knowledge you need to maximize your SQL Server investments and easily integrate, analyze, and report on all of your corporate data, using the Microsoft BI platform, end-user tools and analytics applications. Learn how the SQL Server data platform can help your organization manage any data, any place, any time, with the security, reliability, and scalability that your mission-critical applications require on premise and in the cloud. Hear from experts about how they implement Data Platform and Business Analytics solutions on premise and in the cloud and see how they build and integrate Big Data within their Data Platform.
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In the Developer Tools & Application Lifecycle Management track, learn about Microsoft’s developer tools and technologies which will help you build great applications and manage your application lifecycle.
Improve your skills by learning when to apply certain design patterns and approaches depending on your application priorities and how to implement those using Microsoft development technologies (.NET, web standards, HTML5, JavaScript, C++). Get to know the latest improvements to Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server which will help you and your teams collaborate effectively to build high-quality applications. You will learn how to more effectively bridge the gap between development and operations, and to more effectively collect requirements from your customers and other stakeholders.
The technologies highlighted in this track include:
The Modern Datacenter transforms how IT delivers value by changing the unit of compute from a single server to a datacenter. Through more automation and self-service, the modern datacenter provides a shared set of resources that is agile, scalable, and elastic. Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 enable capabilities that are foundational for organizations that want to improve the reliability and availability of applications and need the ability to quickly expand their datacenter resources using the cloud through Windows Azure and Service Providers.
The Modern Datacenter track goes in-depth on three core subjects: First, Windows Server including Storage, Networking, Virtualization, Server Management and Availability. Second, Datacenter and Cloud Management based on System Center capabilities including Operations Manager, Service Manager, Orchestrator, App Controller and Virtual Machine Manager, as well as implementing your infrastructure management solutions through private and public clouds. Third, Application Management providing key integrated solutions for application performance monitoring and application platform.
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The Office 365 & Unified Communications track covers what’s new in Office client apps; Office 365 and Exchange management, administration and deployment; and the Microsoft Lync Portfolio. Learn how Office 365 will allow customers to leverage online services in new ways, speed up deployments, and save users from inferior solutions. Understand the rapid evolution of Office 365, including the regular update cadence of the cloud service, and Office deployment and migration. Gain deeper understanding of new features of Exchange and Office 365, and your path to the new Office. This track also offers up-to-date information to strengthen your knowledge of the Lync platform, and provides a unified communications roadmap including IM/presence, conferencing, and voice.
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Welcome to the new way to work together. SharePoint represents an efficient, scalable way to work together and stay productive in any environment. With a new, modern UI, the latest release of SharePoint was designed to operate in the cloud and takes advantage of widely adopted web technologies like JavaScript and HTML5, and .NET. SharePoint provides developers with a secure and flexible way to build apps and eye-catching websites. It’s scalable enough to organize and manage all your information assets but it’s also designed to organize and store documents to enable personal productivity, keep teams’ in sync, and projects on track. The SharePoint & Enterprise Social track includes content for the IT Professional, Developer, and TDM.
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Windows Azure is the fastest path to the public cloud for the .NET developer enabling you to re-use your existing skillset and familiar tools such as Visual Studio. Windows Azure can host alternative run-times such as Java, PHP, Node.js and target non-Windows platforms such as Android and iOS mobile clients. Windows Azure supports both writing applications natively for the platform and taking the applications you already have and virtualizing them. The Windows Azure Application Development track balances coverage of individual platform capabilities with how you can use these capabilities together to solve real problems and create applications in the areas of web, mobile, social apps & gaming, business applications, compute intensive workloads, and media & entertainment. Learn how to use Cloud Services to quickly build and manage your applications and let Windows Azure handle provisioning, load balancing, and health monitoring.
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The Windows Client, Access & Management track focuses on four technology areas: Windows Client, Desktop Virtualization, User and Device Management, and Access & Information Protection. Sessions in this track help you plan, deploy, and manage Windows and applications. They help you understand the opportunities that the trends of consumerization and BYOD bring, empowering organizations with the knowledge to give their people the capability to work the way they want, on the devices they choose and how to enable those trends within your organization while keeping corporate policy and compliance standards. We show you how Microsoft user and device management solutions provide consistent and secure user experiences for corporate- or employee-owned devices, while also helping to safeguard corporate data and resources through policy compliance and optimized application delivery. Learn how to leverage Microsoft access and information protection solutions for corporate boundary control and information protection, providing the means to manage a user’s identity across the datacenter and the cloud, provide secure remote access, and define the resources they have access to, based on who they are, what they are accessing, and from what device. Learn how Microsoft Virtualization Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) empowers you to deploy remote desktop services to provide employees the flexibility to work anywhere, while allowing them to access their corporate desktop or application environment from a range of devices.
The technologies highlighted in this track include:
Organizations define the value of smartphones almost exclusively by their ability to enhance workplace productivity. People value technology that helps them be productive, connected, entertained, and informed, all on a single smartphone. Windows Phone delivers on this by putting people first with a unique and engaging user experience and all the tools to help them be productive right out of the box.
The Windows Phone track gives you the knowledge to deploy the Windows Phone into your enterprise, integrate with your existing Microsoft infrastructure including Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Lync, and Microsoft SharePoint, and develop custom apps for the Windows Phone. These sessions cover deployment, use of on-premises or cloud-based services with Windows Phones, and application development. They offer in-depth technical coverage of Windows Phone architecture, technologies, and usage scenarios—plus, help you understand the Windows Phone Marketplace and App Hub for developers.
The technologies highlighted in this track include:
