Day 0/1 - 2
After a very short flight I arrived yesterday with Maarten in Berlin around 10PM. We grabbed a taxi to our hotel and there we had some drinks with guys of Microsoft and other attendees. In the hotel I also met Samuel Erskine who recognized me from TechEd 2008, was nice to meet him again as well. I was pretty tired and got to bed around 2AM.

Next morning we had a great breakfast and at 9AM the Service Manager (SvcMgr) event started. Nigel Cain and Travis Wright of Microsoft were presenting and gave some cool demonstrations as well. The first day of this event was focusing on how to extend Service Manager.

SvcMgr works with Management Packs, pretty much similar as the packs we know of Operations Manager. This gives you the flexibility of modifying about everything in SvcMgr. An example is that you can create your own forms and templates as well. Unfortunately I can’t go in any detail because of the NDA.

We had a great lunch in the hotel and had some more sessions later that day. I also met Panu Saukko (other ConfigMgr MVP). With him and Travis I worked closer on the ConfigMgr integration.

We planned a dinner that night with another colleague. It was Saturday night, first time in Berlin and a pretty busy schedule coming up so this was the time to have some fun as well! With Maarten and four other attendees we went to club Felix. Very nice club, with good music so great fun.

Day 2
After only a couple of hours of sleep the second day of the SvcMgr event started. This day we discuss some more features of SvcMgr, like the integration with ConfigMgr. As of today most is still NDA so no blogging for now unfortunately, but I promise you that as soon as I’m allowed to, I will write some posts about this integration.

Rest of the day we will dive deeper in SvcMgr and tonight we have a dinner with the SvcMgr product team and the TAP members.

I’ll keep you posted…have fun!