Directory Services/Active Directory : Personal

My Value of TechEd

Ulf B. Simon-Weidner — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:08:28 GMT

The last day of TechEd Europe has started. It’s been great as usual. I was satisfied about my sessions, I’m satisfied about other sessions I’ve seen. However – what’s my value of TechEd?

TechEd is inspiring: always when you are put together with a clever bunch of folks, it’s inspiring to talk about technologies, there possibilities as well as what’s lacking, and get a lot of good ideas.
TechEd is networking: hard to keep up with all the people you know or you should know, but TechEd is one of the major places where you get so many people who work with the same technologies and share the same interests. Great place to keep in contact and meet new people – only bad thing that it’s to short
TechEd is geeky: Couple years ago I was complaining that they didn’t have and real 400-Level Sessions at TechEd for IT-Professionals. Then I was able to deliver 400-Level sessions over the years (“A Directory Services Geek’s View on …”), mostly at TechEd EMEA but also at TechEd US. I’m glad to see that especially TechEd Europe is providing in-depth content to IT-Pros (this was actually one thing we’ve heard complains at TechEd US this year, however not at Europe! Hope this still improves). It’s fun to prepare those sessions, it’s fun delivering them, great to get the feedback and great to hear afterwards how happy the attendees are about not getting a marketing session.
TechEd is broadening horizons: Especially when talking with attendees in the Technical Learning Center or after my sessions, or in the evening at parties, it’s broadening my horizons when they are asking questions, tell me about their scenarios and ideas. Even when working as consultant with many companies, I only get to meet a certain amount of customers. However at TechEd I’m meeting so many people every day, so many different scenarios, it’s just great to broaden my horizons and my knowledge!
TechEd is knowledge: Breakout Sessions, Interactive Sessions, Technical Learning Center (Ask the Experts), Hands on Labs, … and about almost all Microsoft technologies – there is only one place where you can lean so much in different ways
TechEd is community: MVPs, MCTs, CLIP, Microsoft employees, colleagues, friends, people who share the same interests, …

… there are lots of more points …

I’m doing multiple conferences a year, and TechEd is boosting knowledge in Microsoft technologies! I love it! To bad it’s the last day today, however I’m also looking forward going home and enjoying the weekend.

Powershell's social responsibility

Ulf B. Simon-Weidner — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 13:20:26 GMT

The world is not as polite anymore as it was years ago. People are forgetting what was called “good behavior / manner”. And Powershell is entering the world and starting to monopolize in the world of scripting languages.

I think Powershell should show some level of social responsibility. And today, I’m taking action to change it:

I, Ulf B. Simon-Weidner, propose hereby that Powershell should be forced to show more social responsibility. Therefore I propose two actions:

Any command executed should, by default, set the –whatif parameter
(This would prevent the commands from executing, it'll only tell us what it would do)

To really execute a command, the –please Parameter must be used, which will revoke the –whatif parameter.

Wouldn’t this be nice?

IT-Administrator in Heidelberg

Ulf B. Simon-Weidner — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 16:14:52 GMT

I'm writing for the German magazine IT-Administrator. Recently they've published an series about Windows Server 2008 and another about Active Directory-Recovery (in Windows Server 2008), and in August they'll publish an article about Hyper-V from me.

Recently they've asked me if I could present a half-day Workshop in Heidelberg. Last Thursday we did this, and the day was exciting and interesting. A lot of good questions, a very interested audience, and I really enjoyed being there. Here are two pictures (and no - I wasn't just sitting around - for some reason they took the pictures while I was demoing AD-Snapshots):

Back to live

Ulf B. Simon-Weidner — Tue, 13 May 2008 21:53:00 GMT

I haven't blogged in a while. A long while. I've been through major changes in my live. Readjusting. Reloading. Sometimes you need to reevaluate things, in technology and in live. Being stable doesn't equal avoiding changes. I've recently heard a statement "nobody will grant you that things get better when you make changes, but to make things better you have to make changes". Very true. And - that's in live and technology - I even believe that avoiding changes make things worse. Sometimes you even benefit from small changes. E.g. at our company we made things better by introducing a single Windows Server 2008 last year. And we had users and admins who had a big benefit. Re-evaluation is good, and changes ... changes are being alive.

But this here is about technology. So let me make a small update on what's going on with me in this field.

After the Directory Experts Conference in Chicago I was working back home, then went to the MVP-Summit in Seattle and it was great so see so many MVPs and folks from the Directory Services Product Group again. I really enjoyed it. Currently I'm preparing for two events: Microsoft TechEd USA for IT-Pros (yes - they followed the example from Europe and split the Developers and IT-Pros in two different weeks - however I enjoyed how it was before). At TechEd which will be in Orlando (again, been there last year, and a then two years before) I'll present 3 sessions and two interactive ones. So five slots in two days (I'm only scheduled in on Wednesday and Thursdays), this will be quite funny . I'm looking forward to it. I'm sad I had to decline the developer-week, but I can't take two weeks of vacation just speaking at two different TechEds. Would love to, but someone has to pay for my living. And I feel I really need vacation this year, I deserved it, believe me, but currently I'm unable to go on vacation.

Another thing I'm getting ready for is a whole day Workshop with the IT-Administrator, we'll cover Windows Server 2008 and nothing else. I'm looking forward to it, and I was told that there are many people signing up for it.

So exciting events to come soon, and I actually have a couple ideas (some already finished) about new technical blog entries, so stay tuned. I'll promise the next one will be technical and coming in a few days .

P.S.: Thanks for listening - I can't remember how many times I said this in the recent past and probably didn't say it often enough.

Impressions of the Directory Experts Conference

Ulf B. Simon-Weidner — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 20:50:00 GMT

Today is day one of the Directory Experts Conference in Chicago. So far the conference has been very good - but that was as expected. I had one session today right before lunch, "A Directory Services Geek's View on Active Directory Recovery in Windows Server 2008". Went quite well, however the power-plug on stage was switched off so my machine decided to go into sleep-mode during the presentation. For some reason this session is attracting Laptop-issues, during the Launch in Frankfurt the virtual machine decided to "unexpectedly shutdown". Things happen, that's part of the fun, isn't it?

HEROS happen {here}

Ulf B. Simon-Weidner — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 14:08:26 GMT

For the past three days I was at the Microsoft Launch Event Germany, the first and as we were told biggest (by the number of attendees) Launch for Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008. I did three presentations:

Active Directory-Domänendienste in Windows Server 2008
(Active Directory-Domainservices in WS2k8)
Erfahrungen eines Directory Services-Experten mit Sicherheit und Delegation im Active Directory
(A Directory Services-Geek's View on Access Control Entries)
Erfahrungen eines Directory Services-Experten mit Active Directory-Recovery mit Windows Server 2008
(A Directory Services Geek's View on Active Directory-Recovery in Windows Server 2008)

The event was very good and very successful as far as I can see. There were minor issues, e.g. on the first day it wasn't that clear which sessions are in which rooms, and the acoustic was pretty bad in some of the rooms since you were able to hear the other speakers of the other rooms as well (luckily two of my presentations were in the good rooms), but over all I was very satisfied. A lot of good and experienced speakers, interested and interesting attendees with good questions and suggestion, a great event. Overall there were about 7500 people in Frankfurt attending this event.

I've also got a view good ideas for some new blog-posts, so stay tuned.

And now it's time to get ready for the Directory Experts Conference 2008 in Chicago in the first week of March. I'll also present there the "Directory Services Geek's View on Active Directory-Recovery in Windows Server 2008" session.

Congrats Microsoft: Windows Server 2008 is RTM

Ulf B. Simon-Weidner — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 07:12:21 GMT

I cannot state it any better: the best Windows Server release ever has been released to manufacturing - Windows Server 2008 is finished.

Windows Server 2008 is very stable and very well-done for production use. As I wrote before we at Computacenter are using it since October 2007 in Production, and I have a customer where we already run a full shop only on Vista and 2k8 since September (on Beta 3).

And we've also done a lot of things, to quickly recap just what we've done with customers was a 10-city Roadshow in Germany (half-day sessions on WS2k8, last one will be in Berlin next week), countless presentations at customer or trade shows / events, countless sessions to make sure our staff is ready to sell and deliver WS2k8-Solutions, one press-release in October, and a couple references which will be published shortly.We will be with many people at the German Launchevent, are partner there with a booth, and I'll deliver 3 sessions plus a interactive one, created many flyers and solutions around the product, … just being ready to deliver.

I'm very excited about the new product - let's start deploying more of it!

And here are the blogs which will give you a feeling how it was at Microsoft in the last couple hours:

Windows Server 2008 - RTM!!!

Windows Server 2008 – A time to sit back, remember and party!

I'm on the Edge [;)]

Ulf B. Simon-Weidner — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 23:23:05 GMT

Last week I was at TechEd:IT-Forum in Barcelona. I'll follow up with more details later. However the guys from edge.technet.com have done an interview with me, which went online last night. I was speaking about my sessions, AD Restore in Windows Server 2008 and Schema Updates.

You can find it currently on the homepage, and here's the direct link for later:

Ulf on AD at TechNet Edge

More speaking engagements

Ulf B. Simon-Weidner — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 21:30:43 GMT

While we are in preperation for TechEd:IT-Forum which will be in Barcelona in November, there are more speaking engagements already scheduled:

October 24th and 25th:

The IT-Administrator asked me to speak about what's new in DNS and Active Directory in Windows Server 2008 at the German Tradeshow Systems. (Details)

November 12th to 16th:

I'll be delivering two sessions and an interactive session at TechEd:IT-Forum in Barcelona. My sessions will be "A Directory Services Geeks View on How to (not) extend your schema" and "Active Directory Recovery in Windows Server 2008", and I will host an interactive session (like the chalk-&-talks of the previous year, a session where attendees are encouraged to ask questions and get them answered) with Stephanie from the AD Product Group about "Active Directory Domain Services in Windows Server 2008".

February 19th to 21st:

Windows Server 2008 will be launched in Germany, and I'll speek at the launch event in Frankfurt. My sessions are "Active Directory Domain Services and DNS in Windows Server 2008" and "A Directory Services Geeks View on Access Control Entries".

March 2nd to 5th:

NetPro already announced the Directory Experts Conference 2008 in Chicago, and I was honored to be asked back as speaker.

DEC-Europe

Ulf B. Simon-Weidner — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 21:54:14 GMT

DEC-Europe is approaching, and since I was communicating heavily the past days about this conference I decided to sum up my favorite reasons why this is the conference to be:

It's dedicated to Microsoft Directory Services
Attendees and Speakers are usually in the same hotel, encourages a lot of after-hour chats
This is the conference of a very high value for the Microsoft Identity and Access Management Product Group, therefore you have a lot of key-players from the PG being there, and they hear your feedback.
The content is very technical - I'm very sure that everyone who attends is getting new knowledge, ideas,...
I think I know a lot about Active Directory and DS in general, however every time I'm at DEC I'm boosting my knowledge.
It's all about community. Even since it's hosted by NetPro it's not about the company. They don't want product pitches outside of the clearly marked sponsor-sessions, they don't talk much about their own products, they welcome everyone - even competitive companies. It's all and only about the Directory Services Communities.
Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals and other industry notables are there and collaborate, answer questions, and just hang around.

I just booked my flights, and I'm very excited to be part of this great conference again. So I hope to see everyone in Brussels in a month.

P.S.: I'll be presenting the following sessions - and Gil, Guido Jorge and me will also do a daily session about Windows Server 2008 Scenarios.

A Directory Services Geek's View on Access Control Entries
You have already deployed Active Directory (AD), but still have a lot of domain administrators? You want to increase security, decrease the risk of administration gone awry and offload daily tasks to delegated admins? In this session you will learn how Access Control works in AD, notes from the field about implementing role based administration and how to figure out what to delegate. Additionally we will drill down on implementing delegation using scripts and share details on what to delegate. After this session you'll be able to design and implement role-based administration in your infrastructure.

A Directory Services Geek's View on How to (not) update your Schema
Are you:
- supposed to integrate some 3rd Party Schemaextensions in your Forest?
- asked to design your own schema extension?
- trying to figure out how to administer additional or new attributes?
Then you have to see this session. We will clear up the fog around schema extensions by explaining the difference between schema extensions and schema configuration, talk about designing/evaluating schema extensions (when is a extension “smooth” and when is it dangerous), and provide guidance on creating administrative interfaces for additional / new attributes. We are also announcing how Windows Server 2008 helps you when extending your schema. Come to this very technical session to get the most complete coverage about schema extensions you have ever seen.

What's up?

Ulf B. Simon-Weidner — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 00:38:52 GMT

OK - it's been a while since I last posted. Many things were going on.

The last post was in the Directory Experts Conference-Timeframe. Wow - a lot was going on. I'll write later some thoughts about DEC, even if others have covered it well (like Gil, Joe, Jorge, Tomek) it's worth some words.

What else was going on? OK - recently I've got ready for TechEd Orlando, where I answer questions in the Ask-the-Experts Area at the Windows Server - Active Directory Booth. Then I'm busy with a roadshow about Windows Server 2008 in Germany. If you are in Germany and have business-relationships with Computacenter go to www.computacenter.de/veranstaltungen or ask your contacts to join. We have done and will do 6 locations until end of June (already been to Ludwigshafen, Nuremberg, Stuttgart and Saarbrücken and will be in Frankfurt and Munich in June), with more location coming up in the second half of 2007. I did a lot to organize and create these events, and I'm working together with some great collegues here, so if you are able to take a chance and join.

Additional NetPro has announced that they will bring the Directory Experts Conference to Europe again this year, and I'm glad that I'm able to help being an active part of that conference. I'm looking forward to it very much.

Otherwise ... many customer events and other things around Windows Server 2008 - this will be a great release and customers are asking about it like crazy. It's always a pleasure to see a product being sucessful where you were able to provide good feedback on and you know that this feedback was aprechiated and taken into credit. I'm looking forward to the release, and as much as I've tested the previous and current versions, and what I know from RC1, this will be a blasting release. If you didn't had a chance to look at it - do it now - you're already late.

I'm still alive (3) - and MVP again!

Ulf B. Simon-Weidner — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 21:48:37 GMT

So right after the new year started, I also got a great message: I was again reawarded as MVP for Windows Server - Directory Services. This is the fourth time in a row I got the award, and I'm really proud of it. THANK YOU Microsoft!

Currently work got me again, and this year will also be pretty busy. I'm looking forward to some interesting Projects, some interesting Conferences (I like to mention the Directory Experts Conference, which will be very exciting this year, we are already planning the Pre-Conference on Longhorn Server Active Directory and I'll also talk a few sessions).

But I'm totally recovered and working like crazy - and I have a couple interesting posts to take care of pretty soon, so stay tuned!

I'm still alive (2)

Ulf B. Simon-Weidner — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 21:40:57 GMT

So after getting back from Barcelona I had a lot of work to make sure I'll be able to take some vacation during X-Mas. Worked like crazy. Also I had to finish an article, which was published in January in the IT-Administrator. I covered Security-Basics, Delegation and implementing Rolebased Administration in Active Directory. Yes - it complements my talk

Finally I was able to go on vacation from X-Mas to the first week of January. I was looking forward to it - I'm used to much work, however the last year was the worst ever and I was unable to finish everything - to many customers at the same time while always having issues to find "bodies".

So what happened? Sure! If you give your body time to relax, it takes whatever needed to recover. So I had a bad could over New Years until the end of the first week in January. Not very relaxing, so I decided to stay the second week of January still at home and keep my workload low.

I had to recover and deserved it!

TechEd EU 2006 in Barcelona

Ulf B. Simon-Weidner — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 00:20:15 GMT

So ... TechEd was just great - I can not describe it in other words.

As I wrote in a prior post I had some sessions to take care of at TechEd. So after we arrived in Barcelona we first had a dinner with the MCT-Community which we really enjoyed. There are so many MCTs out there who are so dedicated to their "passion" (and job) that it's always a pleasure to meet everyone and enjoy geek-talking. After the conference started I still wanted to adjust the demos of my session to show some new stuff. Unfortunately I made a small mistake (if you have dual-boot with Vista RC2 and XP try to avoid hibernating - especially if you have a laptop vendor which does provide very bad drivers) so I had some harddisk corruption on my Laptop. Did I mention that the PPTs and the demos were all supposed to run from my laptop (the XP-Part)? So I had some joy in fixing my Laptop on the road without the CDs, however I managed to get it up and running again (before it went right into a bluescreen after the bootmanager) - some files in XP were still corrupt (and they are currently still corrupt - didn't had the time to reinstall and I'm only using the Vista-Installation anyways). Learned it the hard way - do not hibernate with shared disks.

So after I was sure that at least Powerpoint and VPC are back and running I was adjusting my demos. The rest of the time of the first days (there wasn't much as you can assume) I spent in the Ask-the-Experts-Area and answered questions in the Longhorn Booth. This is one of my favorite things at those conferences - you get so much insight of many issues within multiple companies, and how attendees (mis)understand the products. This also gives me ideas which points we have to outline in talks and blogs, apart from enjoying to helping the attendees.

On Wednesday I had the first of two Chalk-&-Talks with Karmal Janardhan (Group Program Manager in the Active Directory Program Group). The concept of Chalk-&-Talks is a mixture between Ask-the-Experts and Breakout Sessions. You have many attendees in a session room, you are not supposed to use Powerpoint (a few slides to help the discussion getting started or outlining examples are accepted) and you are discussing technologies with the attendees. We did a Chalk-&-Talk on "Active Directory and DNS in Longhorn". It was just great. Kamal is so deep into the planning and features of the technology, and I was able to contribute with my practical experience. We both enjoyed the session, and according to the discussion and feedback afterwards the attendees enjoyed it as well. I don't think there was another session where you could get a better knowledge topic. OK - maybe Kamals Breakout Session which covered the same topic - but I even think we were able to explain it better in the Chalk-&-Talk due to the discussion format of the session. We had the last session-slot of the day and the room was crowded. There were people leaving because there was no more space. Afterwards in the Hotels Lounge some other speaker was complaining that the last session of the day was empty in many sessions and the attendees were supposedly already off partying, but I know where they were .

On Thursday afternoon I had my own session: "A Directory Services Geek's View on Access Control Entries (ACE)". Since I just had a few minutes between the session prior to me I decided to use a longer break before to connect my laptop to power at the speakers desk and get it up and running, so that the session before allows the power management-drivers to "adjust". Otherwise the time to start up as well as the performance would be questionable. This was a good decision - I didn't had any issues with performance, the session and demos went very well (OK - I was a bit nervous because I still didn't trust my recovered laptop). I love this session, since I was always missing Geek-Level content at TechEds, so I was happy to present it. There were a lot of interested attendees, feedback was great (e.g. "You can improve the conference by doing more sessions like this.", and "excellent session - best one I have been to so far" on a Thursday afternoon). There were many interesting questions right after the session, but at some point we got bounced so that the next session was able to start. However I went right back into the Ask-the-Expert-Area and had some lengthy discussion about the topic with some attendees. Very interesting talks - so we continued until we were told that the exhibition area is closing and we are to leave.

On Friday Kamal and I repeated our Chalk-&-Talk about "Active Directory and DNS in Longhorn" right in the morning. We had slightly less attendees (probably partying the night before, or everyone was in our first session) but the discussion was still very good. Kamal is impressive - at her own session she got a comment like "how comes a little girl tells all geek's in here how technology really works" . After the Chalk-&-Talk we went to the Ask-the-Experts-Area, and I didn't leave until the conference was over. There were so many interesting questions. Actually some attendees were coming up to me with their "List of Questions" they made up during the week, so I was answering .. answering .. answering ... (I call it the "streaming answering mode" now ).

However - what a great week - everytime again!

I'm still alive (1)

Ulf B. Simon-Weidner — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 22:58:03 GMT

OK - I haven't written a post in quite a long time. The last one was before I went to TechEd EU in Barcelona. So what happened?
I decided that I've deserved some vacation, so I went with my wife and a "close friends couple" to Hurghada, Egypt to do some sun-tanking and scuba-diving. I enjoyed it, there are great beautiful animals in the red sea (kind of poisoning too, so you are far safer snorkeling or diving then swimming or worse - walking).

Afterward we went almost straight (one day re-packing in Munich) to Barcelona.

TechEd and Barcelona was great (again). Microsoft has done a great deal in making this the best TechEd/IT-Forum in the last years (at least in my opinion), they valuated the feedback from last year and the conference was great. I'll continue in the next post with my experience from TechEd, since this is really deserving a separate post.

Directory Experts Conference and Book success

Ulf B. Simon-Weidner — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 22:10:28 GMT

OK - amazon.de is not having their database under control lately - they are fairly unable to update book descriptions and authors, and the statistics are going up and down. However, we got word from our publisher that the Windows Server 2003 - Die Expertentipps book is selling very well, and yesterday we had place 8th in the top IT-Bestsellers. We also had some comments. Fairly positive about the content, however a couple typos. While I'm really sorry about this, I'm also a bit concerned since we figured that many of those went in after our last review. However - the publisher is taking care of this and nobody blaming us (so far).

The planning of the Directory Experts Conference started and I've found something very funny related to it today. If you just pretend to be a Active Directory-Expert (and can't make it to DEC), you are able to get your own Rubber Chicken (actually a cheap copy) at the animal toys department of some stores.

I found the rubber chicken on the shelves of a German department store today, so you are free to pretend being at DEC [1].

[1] Careful - real Directory Experts know the difference.

TechEd EU and what else is keeping me busy

Ulf B. Simon-Weidner — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 19:50:26 GMT

I just recognized - I didn't post anything for a month. This is awful! Currently I'm very busy at my daytime-job (turns out it's not just daytime lately - just to much to work). And currently defines as this year (almost). However - I do a lot of interesting work - so that's fine. There are also a couple other things which suck up my spare time

And I also got the word from the organizers of TechEd EU that I'll be speaking there - look forward to my session

IAM402: A Directory Services Geek's View On Access Control Entries (ACE)

You have already deployed Active Directory, but still a lot of domain administrators? You want to increase security, decrease the risk of administration gone awry and offload daily tasks to delegated admins? In this session you will learn how Access Control works in Active Directory, notes from the field about implementing role based administration and how to figure out what to delegate. Additionally we will drill down on implementing delegation using scripts and share details on what to delegate. After this session you'll be able to design and implement role-based administration in your infrastructure.

TechEd EU will be in Barcelona this year in November - Microsoft has joined their major European Conferences TechEd and IT-Forum into one Conference with two parts - for IT-Pros and for Developers. Both of them will be in November. And I haven't updated the session description yet - but I plan on including some changes in Longhorn. This session is pretty interesting - after delivering it at the Directory Experts Conference in Las Vegas earlier this year where about 500 Directory Experts were attending I had a lot of interesting conversations with attendees afterwards. Now I'm able to deliver this session in Europe as well - I'm looking forward to it.

Publications: Article and Book

Ulf B. Simon-Weidner — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 10:49:01 GMT

My next Article was published in the June Edition of the IT-Administrator. In Informationsmekka Internet I explained how to use old and new Internet Technologies such as newsgroups, blogging, tagging, podcasts and seach engines to increase your "Who-knows-what"- or Knowledge-Network to the Internet.

I also received the first paper-copy of my new book, which was mentioned in my prior blog-entry Finished, Exhausted, Done!

Finished, Exhausted, Done!

Ulf B. Simon-Weidner — Tue, 16 May 2006 21:15:25 GMT

I just finished the finalizing work on my next book, which I wrote with a couple other Windows Server MVPs. We are providing tipps and tricks around Windows Server 2003 (including R2). The book is for MS-Press Germany, and I expect it in the stores pretty soon since the publishing process is very well done at MS-Press. Actually it has been available for pre-ordering on a couple online-bookstores for a couple month now.

Here it is at Amazon Germany:

Windows Server 2003 - Die Expertentipps

I'm kind of tired and exhausted now since I had to do all the finalizations, however I'm glad I'm done, all reviews are in and I only need to wait for publishing. Now I'll have some time to relax, go to the gym again, meet friends, enjoy the weather, and do some other stuff I wanted to do for ages but haven't had time this year yet.

Three MOC-Courses for Windows Server 2003 R2 available

Ulf B. Simon-Weidner — Tue, 16 May 2006 21:03:08 GMT

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 are I'm pretty happy with their content (OK - if you are trainer you have to adjust it to the needs of your audience, but that's what's a trainers supposed to do). Especially I like that there are Labs which also mention the commandline-tools you could use instead, and you have the possibility of general- or step-by-step-instructions - depending on your skill level.

Also they are covering skills you need as designer as well as skills you need for daily administration - again - adjust as trainer as needed.

I mentioned a lot of tipps recently in a train-the-trainer webcast - if you missed it or want additional discussions follow up in the private newsgroups.

The three courses are:

4356: Managing Branch Office Resources Using Microsoft® Windows Server™ 2003 R2
2 day course on Managing Branch Office Resources Using Windows Server 2003 R2
4357: Managing Data Storage Using Microsoft® Windows Server™ 2003 R2
1 day course on Managing Data Storage Using Windows Server 2003 R2
4358: Deploying and Managing Active Directory Federation Services in Microsoft® Windows Server™ 2003 R2
2 day course on Deploying and Managing Active Directory Federation Services

If you are teaching this class or attending and like to comment - go ahead - feedback is apprechiated.