After a weekend in Amsterdam, where most of us took some time for some sightseeing, we had to get back to work on the bus tour. Over the weekend we said goodbye to David Elfassy and hello to Ian Hameroff, who will be presenting Exchange Server 2010, and Stephen Rose, who will be presenting Windows 7 this week.
Today was by far our busiest day with four events planned…two of which were at the same time. As a result, we had to split into two teams with Ian, Stephen, and Ken going to CompuTrain while Melissa, Tjeerd, Bob, Chris, and I went to Isential in Zwolle. Tjeerd introduced the event and the team in Dutch, so we are hoping that he said mostly nice things about us. He also did his Windows 7 presentation in Dutch. Because Ken had to be at the other event, we invited a guest speaker, Maarten Goet, who is a Springboard Technical Expert Panel (STEP) member and very knowledgeable about Windows Server 2008 R2. He lives in the area and speaks Dutch as well, so I was the only presenter who spoke in English although I did use one of the two Dutch words that I know in my presentation (“good morning”—the other being “thank you,” which I forgot to use at the end of my presentation).
This was another spectacular event with more than 120 attendees. It was held in Isential’s brand new facility - in fact this is the week that they open and the painters were still taking care of the last details. Get this, the training facilities are inside the soccer stadion in Zwolle. Dual screens and state of the art PCs everywhere AND one of the classrooms overlooks the field. I wonder how much work is actually done when there is a game, but the seats must be great! The Isential team was excited to have us at their location and served breakfast of donuts, bagels, fruit, and cereal.
By the way, I had a great time this weekend in Amsterdam. It is a beautiful city with an amazing history (~100 kilometers (63 miles) of canals, the canals are 3 meters deep, all 900 of the old fashioned windmills are national monuments but only 200 are still in operation). And let me tell you about the stroopwaffles...they gotta be the tastiest thing on the whole planet. If you find yourself in Amsterdam, they are a must have. I’ll be thinking about them long after I’m gone.