Last week, Lifehacker attended Microsoft's TechEd event in New Orleans with three IT Pro bloggers in tow. Here's what they learned during their four day experience...

A crucial part of our World Of Servers coverage of TechEd North America 2013 was the contributions from our contest-winning IT pro bloggers Tommy Carron, Adam Webster and David Klemke. What did they learn during the week? What does the future hold for Windows Server 2012? Will New Orleans ever be safe again? Read on and find out!

I came to TechEd North America expecting to walk away with a few noteworthy points, maybe even a couple of cool strategies I could possibly on-sell, but what I left with was much, much more than that.

Only four days in and TechEd 2013 North America was already over. Each day had been crammed full of technical sessions and other conference activities. The opening keynote, demonstrations, labs, vendor promotions and of course the Surface queue. Not to mention the abundance of American cuisine to keep us energised as Microsoft's evangelists sought to inspire.

I've got soul and I'm super bad! My time in New Orleans is coming to an end and with that are some mixed emotions. The experience I've had over the last week has been incredible and it's sure to be one that I'll remember for a long time.

Last week our 2013 World Of Servers series reached its climax with a trip to New Orleans for Microsoft's TechEd North America 2013 conference. Here are the five big lessons I took away from that event (plus a round-up of what our competition-winning bloggers thought about it).

Missed one of the many videos from our coverage from TechEd 2013 North America this week? We've rounded them all up here in a single handy post. Enjoy!

90 per cent of a data scientist's job involves finding data from a wide variety of sources and then collating the masses of information into digestible tables. Microsoft's Data Explorer is an add-in for Excel that does essentially the same job in a few mouse clicks. We were given a demonstration of how it works at TechEd 2013...

Day 4 of TechEd 2013 sees our guest blogger and competition winner Adam Webster focus on troubleshooting, highlighting tools for tackling malware and slow logons. Also: a new hat is in evidence.

As TechEd 2013 draws towards its close, our guest blogger David Klemke looks at how Azure will play an increasingly important role in backup and disaster recovery for smaller firms. Plus: David chats with PowerShell guru Don Jones about the future of admin and how to beef up your IT pro skills.

For the final day of TechEd North America 2013, our competition winner and guest blogger Tommy Carron spreads his wings, covering everything from storage enhancements in Windows Server 2012 R2 to Direct Access. But there's still time for doughnuts and thunderstorms.

Much of the emphasis at TechEd North America 2013 this week has been on the new features coming in Windows Server 2012 R2. However, with the original Windows Server 2012 just nine months in the market, many businesses still aren't taking advantage of features that are already available. Here are 10 that are worth using in your Windows network deployment.

During TechEd 2013, we asked Microsoft's chief PowerShell expert Don Jones for his top three scripting language tips. If you're just starting out in PowerShell or want to speed up the daily grind, his insights are worth a look.

BitLocker encryption ensures that data doesn't fall into nefarious hands, but it can be a nuisance for users who forget passwords or administrators who want to push out updates to locked-down machines. One lesser-used feature of Windows Server 2012 can eliminate those pains by automatically entering BitLocker credentials when a device is connected to a corporate LAN.

At TechEd North America 2013, Microsoft revealed additional details about Windows 8.1 (AKA the impending update for its sometimes controversial operating system). While the additional tools and features are nothing to sniff at, they're probably not going to convince many Windows 8 critics to give the OS a try. So let's look towards the next update -- as a Windows 7/XP user, what does Microsoft need to add that would make you a Win8 convert?

Looking to enhance virtualisation performance under Hyper-V? Centralise storage and shift to VHDX.

Once again, BYOD has been one of the hot topics at this year's TechEd conference. In this video Microsoft's director of product marketing Andrew Conway discusses some of the BYOD issues facing IT professionals and the steps they can take to effectively migrate to a people-centric IT environment.

Last night I tried some Louisiana fried chicken and went for a quick walk along the Mississippi River near Woldenberg Park. Retiring early for the evening I joined fellow competition winner Adam Webster for pre-conference breakfast at the convention centre. According to the TechEd kitchen so far over eighty-thousand pieces of bacon have been served. As I’ve contributed to that statistic, some serious dieting will need to follow my visit to New Orleans!

Microsoft's current private cloud strategy seems to be one that was designed with a lot of right hands not talking to the left ones. The services that most closely approach the cloud ideal (self service, elastic/dynamic resource provisioning) don't have a unifying vision behind them, even when they come under the same branch. Just look at the wild differences between the self service portals available in System Center Virtual Machine Manager (now deprecated, more on that in a sec), Service Manager and App Controller which all present wildly different views for the same underlying infrastructure. You could argue that they're designed with different purposes in mind and sure to an extent that's true but the fact is there's no overarching direction for them all to head towards. That is, until the Windows Azure Pack becomes generally available.