I am out of the home starting tomorrow (Saturday April 21) for most of this coming week. Any emails you send me may or may not be responded to until after I return some time after that – maybe a long time after that if it is an exceptionally annoying email. 🙂
If you have something extremely important you need to tell me then you better hop on a plane and start rooting around the lovely Casino Resort I am staying at because otherwise you are SOL. Oh and just to make it fun, I won’t spend all of my time there, I intend to poke around Las Vegas a bit and maybe take in a show or two and generally enjoy myself. Maybe Criss Angel or Penn and Teller, that would rock.
If you prefer my work OOO message, it is
I am at the 2007 Directory Experts Conference discussing technology with other Directory Experts for the next week. If you need me, you can find me there. 🙂
Expect poor to no response to any emails / phone messages / carrier pigeons / smoke signals sent my way until I return around Monday April 30.
Of course the April 30th date is incredibly optimistic but if I put anything later down someone somewhere I am sure would have to find some reason to complain. 😉
So anyway… I will be in Las Vegas attending the world famous/infamous Directory Experts Conference 2007 put on by our friends at NetPro. I keep saying this but I mean it, if you need to get info on AD this is a really good conference to attend. If you are responsible for AD in your company, it is probably worth you going. Even if only for the intersession chatter and to throw fruits and vegetables at some of the presenters (Deji I promise to bring in nothing larger than an orange this time… But I am coming to your presentation and some form of fruit will likely be involved). This is a great place to go because you have people like me who write free tools listening to everyone’s problems and coming up with ideas for new tools or things to add to already existing tools and you have a multitude of vendors there listening as well and willing to build tools that they can sell to you. They much rather know up front what people want than try to guess.
Many folks are afraid to go to a conference like this because they see it is put on by vendors and this is because they think it is a big sales drive and you will be locked in a room and forced to listen to the vendors shove their benefits down your throat. This really isn’t the case, it isn’t a time share in the mountains of Colorado or the lush palms of Florida. To be honest, this is my 4th or 5th DEC and I have yet to have seen one of the presentations of the vendors. I am sure in many cases they prefer I stay OUT of their presentations, I ask all of the wrong questions. Instead I have literally had hours upon hours of amazing conversations and seen some spectacular presentations. The vendors are there to talk to you if you want to or you have specific problems you want to see if they can solve, but it is entirely up to you.
Something else that some people are concerned about and I admit a couple of years ago when Gil and Christine mentioned that they were thinking about Vegas for the 2006 conference I was concerned about was the whole, well there go the attendees, who wants to sit in a room listening to Princess talk about Longhorn features when you have gambling, booze, and otherworldly beautiful scantily glad girls running around in the casinos. Boy was I shocked at the 2006 DEC, very few people drifted off to the various vices during the sessions or during the social gatherings.
To wrap this up, for Active Directory people, there really is no better conference to attend. You will not get this much focus or this much quality from TechEd or Windows Connections or any of those other conferences. Plus you won’t get the same personal experience, those other conferences are too big, DEC has a very friendly everyone knows your name quality to it. I can generally make one to two conferences a year because that is about all I can pull off in the company I work for and even that is a stretch… The first is a no-brainer, that is the Windows MVP Summit. I get to sit down and talk to the folks writing the stuff I love to use plus MSFT pays for everything but airfare. I will go to the summit regardless of whether work says I can or not – it would literally be criminally stupid of me not to attend that given the benefits versus investment. The second is also a no-brainer, it is DEC and it is because again, that has the best collection of Active Directory Expertise in one place at one time.
joe
I’m intimidated by DEC. I picture all these MVP’s and legends talking about AD and all the cool things they are doing and how they are working with Longhorn beta and will be ready to deploy when it comes out.
…then they turn to me and my input sucks. Well I’m a contractor work for a government agency and we are happy about upgrading to 2003 on all our DC’s and even that is not done yet.
Oh that is the last thing you should feel. A lot of the MVPs and legends say stupid or silly things just as easily as anyone else can. We are all people. There have been a couple of times where I have seen an MVP presentation and then realize or reconfirm in my head that that person probably shouldn’t be an MVP. As for legends, often when you meet them in person you realize they aren’t quite the legend you thought and that they too put on their shoes one foot at a time. Sometimes though you find them even more interesting.
On the flip side I have seen “normal people” running medium sized shops that have come up with some incredibly interesting observations or plans that they had no clue were interesting because it is so normal to them.
On the Longhorn front, yes, there are *some* MVPs that are immersed in and totally playing with Longhorn and rooting out all of the new cool features, that by far is a minority – honestly only two DS MVPs come to mind when I think of people doing that and I and my friend Dean aren’t either one of them though we are both playing with Longhorn to the extent we can. Some of us just don’t have that much time to live in it because we have real work with customers who aren’t using it. Quite frankly I will openly admit that I am way behind on all of the Longhorn features. It bothers me to some extent but not too incredibly much because of several things:
1. Most of my customers (real job and joeware) won’t be using Longhorn for a long time so need of practical info truly isn’t there. It is more my personal curiosity.
2. I know that when I need to know it, that I have proven in the past to be able to figure it out and I am pretty confident that will happen again. I have moved from NT4 to 2K to K3 just fine. Before that I moved through various versions of PDP-11 RSTS/E and VAX VMS and OS/2 and DOS and Windows 3.x and SunOS and Solaris and BSD. Immersion is the best way to learn pretty much anything and that will come hell or high water, I don’t know too many people still running DOS 3.1 or SunOS exclusively.
3. Once Longhorn goes gold I will upgrade my main DC at home to it and then I will start running into the things that you only run into when you really use it versus just playing with it. While a lot of stuff is caught in beta, a lot of stuff isn’t. Don’t think the land is unexplored by the time everything goes gold, that just isn’t proven out in fact.
I encourage all IT people to run a DC at home and make your PC or PCs at home a member of that domain and when it breaks, figure it out. Virtualization software right now is rampant, get some cheapo piece of hardware and you can really run Windows Server on it. Getting the Windows Server is probably the more difficult thing and for that I recomment IT people get MSDN Subscriptions. If IT is someone’s career, they need to invest in it. Shit isn’t just going to be given to them. It is SOOOOO much easier now to have this stuff to play with at home than it ever was before. Not so long ago if we wanted to test the interaction between 10 DCs, we needed 10 pieces of hardware, now you can do that with a single PC.
As for 2K versus 2K3, one of the recent customers I went in to help was running a full K3 functional level forest, I was thrilled, that was the first one I had run into in true production use that I got to work on – seriously. It isn’t like everyone else is sitting there waiting to jump onto Longhorn. Sure there are companies that are already running Longhorn DCs in production because of special agreements with MSFT, don’t feel jealous of that – it can be a very painful and just because it is being done doesn’t mean everyone in the company is fully exposed. In a real live normal production environment in a normal company (not a tech company) I have very little trouble with companies that choose to hold back until SP1 or later unless they really need features in the new OS version and are trying to “fake” out features they would get with the new OS with silly workarounds. Now service companies that come out to tell you you should be running Longhorn or Exchange 2K7 or Office 2K7 etc… They should be running that bleeding edge stuff near completely. The Unisyses, the IBMs, the Avanades, the Accentures, the HPs, etc – if they are selling solutions in those areas, they better be running it at almost 99%+ internally IMO – not just some of them are running it. If not, how could someone feel they have the experience to tell you how to do it? I don’t run Exchange 2K7 at all, I mostly don’t use O2K7, I absolutely wouldn’t push someone in those directions as I don’t have the knowledge or understanding of them.
In general at DEC, I listen to the MVPs and “legends” about general chatter and to just talk to them because most of them are people I consider friends. I really listen to the “normal” people and like to talk tech with them because I like to understand the kinds of problems they are having to give me ideas on things I should add to my utility set. If for instance, one of the best AD Guys I know, my friend Dean works in an environment (or if I walk into an environment) I know his set (and my set) of issues will be much different than say you would have (we all would get stuck on different things). In general, there are FAR more people in the world who will have the same issues you have versus what Dean has. I write my tools for me and things I need that don’t exist or exist in formats I don’t like and I write my tools for folks like you. It is tough for me to understand problems a lot of folks may have without getting feedback from them. One of the big problems I have any more at DEC is walking up to a group of people and just listening to what they are discussing because I am being recognized too much and people clam up thinking I am there to make them look stupid… Absolutely not, there is no point in it for me to do so.
Seriously, DEC isn’t a meeting of the Greek gods, it is just a bunch of geeks getting together to talk.
Thanks for the reply, that was a good. I’ll be at DEC next year for sure then, even if I have to spring for it. I had the wrong impression of DEC. I do run virtual machines and I agree that testing and learning is easier now to setup and test and learn; I’ve found the TechNet Virtual labs to be a good place to learn too.
Have a great time in Vegas!