I got a chance to go to MEC this week. I'm happy to be here, because I get a chance to learn more about Microsoft Exchange and I get to visit Florida for the first time.

Yesterday I listened to both keynote talks and went to a few breakout sessions. This conference is good for getting a crash course on the thinking behind the new version of Exchange and to get introduced to its new features.

I attended a couple interesting breakout sessions in the afternoon:

• Brett Tanzer led a discussion regarding anti-spam, anti-malware, and compliance, which includes DLP. They showed how the DLP policy templates work, and they also showed policy tips, which are neat (think MailTips, but instead of the message telling you that I'm out of the office, it says that you have a credit card number in the email you are writing, like "are you sure you want to do that?"
• After that I went to a hybrid (hosting some mailboxes on premises and some in the cloud, with free/busy visibility and calendar sharing) session led by Ben Appleby. He talked about scenarios involving the migration wizard and the hybrid wizard and why you might want “centralized transport,” which is what we call it when your MX record points to your on-premises server and eventually up to your cloud mailboxes. He also discussed how the move to Exchange Server 2013 on-premises affects hybrid. For instance, you can’t run Exchange 2013 on premises with the previous version of Office 365 in the cloud.