Directory Services/Active Directory

I just arrived back from the Directory Experts Conference in Las Vegas (last weekend, times have been busy, jetlag has been bad) and it was a blast. The venue hotel - Green Valley Resort and Spa - was very comfortable and nice to support the event.

 

Saturday I arrived late and was immediately sucked into helping Gil Kirkpatrick and Guido Grillenmeier to prepare the environment for the preconference (Active Directory Desaster Recovery Workshop) on Sunday. It was quite fun, since a couple MVPs got together there to help, and we haven't seen for a while.

Sunday we went early to check that everything was prepared for the preconf, and there was still some work for us to do - while the presentation part started. Guido took a great picture of us doing minor adjustments in the front row to get everything started up (loads of Virtual Servers to support the 130+ attendees of the preconf).

 

On Monday I had my first session "Untangling Microsoft's Directory Services". I introduced all DS-technologies, showed some Customer and common scenarios, and was talking about the whens and hows and whys about schema extensions. I was pretty satisfied - the session went well and there were a lot of attendees very interested in the topic.

On Tuesday I had my second session, "A Directory Services Geeks view on Access Control Entries". I spoke about the basics of security descriptors and how to program against them, what tools are provided, how to figure out what to delegate, how to implement delegated roles both - technically and more important, politically - best practices and also what to take care of when extending administrative interfaces. Also the session had a lot of demos I did well without burning something to satisfy the demo-god in advance.

Wednesday (when I finally survived jetlag) there was the last day of the conference, and the first day for me to partially relax since I did not have any more sessions or duties during the conference. This evening we first went to dinner with the DS-Productgroup (thanks Stuart - we really enjoyed it) and then we went into the Bellagio (well known from "Oceans 11"). However since Gil (the conference founder and organizator) and a couple of the speakers went together we ended up within minutes into the lounge of a bar and were basically lying around totally exhausted.

 

The week has been a blast - the speakers and the attendees were directory services experts and we had a lot of very interesting conversations. I received a lot of interesting and good feedback from attendees, and know that I was delivering the right topics which apparently were valuable to a lot of people. Netpro did a great job organizing the event, and they were great hosts (thanks Stella, Christine and everyone else involved). Microsofts DS-Productgroups was coming with a whole crowed (most of them well known from previous events) and all of them were very active participating and did really care about customer ideas and feedback. Thanks to Stuart Kwan (Director of Program Management of Identity and Access Management) who was attending himself, delivering the keynote and enabled a lot of his group to attend. There were also a lot of other MVPs either attending or speaking, and I only heard great feedback about each of the sessions which were delivered by MVPs.

 

I really liked that event, and think this is the event to be at next year again.

 

If you want to look at the bios of the people I just wrote about check the DEC-Website/Bios.

 

If you attended my sessions - I really value feedback either as comment to this post or via my contact form on this blog. And if you attended my ACE-Session, check the URL I provided in the slide deck after this weekends since the promised scripts and examples will be available on Monday 10th.

I've recently seen that the three MOC-Courses (MOC = Microsoft Official Curriculum) around Windows Server 2003 R2 technologies have been released.

I did the technical reviews of those MOC-Courses and I'm really satisfied with them. The first one is a two-day class which will show you how to use Windows Server 2003 R2 to support your needs in Branch-Office scenarios, the second course (one day) will teach you the new features about Storage and SAN-Management, and the last one will teach you how to implement a Active Directory Federation Services Relationship internally or with your business partners.

 

The course does not only increase your experience by a lot of hands on labs, but also teaches you how to design your infrastructure and provides a lot of examples which command lines you can use to administer or implement the features.