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    In certain company

        She’ll tell you she’s an orphan

               After you meet her family…

That is what I will remember as the last moments of the Directory Experts Conference 2007. Officially the conference ended the day before but that was the song playing on the radio as I zipped up my suitcase and rolled out of the hotel room to go jump onto the airport shuttle; putting a fork in yet another DEC in a sad way. Should have left the radio on jazz. 🙂

I have attended the last four US based DEC’s. Those being

DEC 2007 Las Vegas, NV – Red Rock Casino Resort
DEC 2006 Las Vegas, NV – Green Valley Resort
DEC 2005 Vancouver, BC
DEC 2004 Reston, VA (Washington D.C)

They have all had their pluses and minuses, overall I have enjoyed each and I am happy to be what I consider a  “DEC Family Member”. I may be pushing it a little because I really don’t have much to do with the setup or running of the event, I just attend and have fun and talk to people. I consider myself a family member because I have presented but even before I presented I think I was in the family based on how other attendees treated me. I think folks like coming up and chatting with me but every year it seems there are a few more folks who are a little more tentative to do so unless they have someone officially introduce us, possibly they are scared or uncomfortable, I am not sure. If I am standing there, I am fair game, come chat. If I am engrossed in a conversation, come up but get a feel for the conversation before diverting it. If I appear to be making for a lavatory, point me in the right direction and heaven forbid, please don’t stop me. 😉

This year was a bit interesting for me…. I had people who wanted to take a picture of me with them, I had people who would just stare for 5,10,20 minutes[1] before approaching me (yeah I noticed), I was hugged, I was pecked on the cheek(s) in European high style, I might have been kissed on the lips by Ulf but maybe that was just a dream of mine, I was even bowed to by a couple of different people – none of whom were of Asian descent which is when I would expect it. On top of that I had a lot of people who asked when the joe and Dean Show was going to be and what room it was in as they didn’t want to miss it. This made me feel pretty good. I had someone I worked with in the past[2] who told me I changed his life for the better due to my guidance and I guess inspiration and pushing him to learning perl which he then parlayed into PowerShell knowledge; that made me feel great. I can’t count the number of folks who were just thrilled with my work in the newsgroups and/or the joeware utilities. I heard stories of my utilities saving tens if not hundreds of thousands of hours for companies globally. Admins who because of what I have done made their jobs easier so they could sooner go home to their wives, kids, bags of peanut M&M’s, whatever, you name it. How can I not feel on top of the world after all of that?

 

So lets get into the specifics…

The Resort

This year, for the second year in a row, DEC was held just outside of Las Vegas. Last year we were in Green Valley Resort, this year we were in Red Rock Casino Resort. I guess it is the same folks who run both but the Red Rock just smoked Green Valley. It was amazing, my nearest comparison would be a Yucatan Peninsula type resort. I mean it wasn’t the Aventura Spa Palace which will kill you with amazement, but it was trying awfully hard to be that good.

The resort is absolutely something I recommend. It had an amazing restaurant called TBones Chophouse which despite its unfortunate name was very very good. So good that Dean and I chose that place for our last meal at the resort. I admit, it was on the costly side. If costly isn’t your bag, they have an amazing $9.99 chicken fajita dinner right across the casino from TBones.

The casino itself was pretty nice, it got a little packed at times but it was no where near as bad or as, dare I say it, low class, as the casino’s on the strip. Not that the strip is a bad place, it is just that it is an entirely different feel. If you want the “experience” of Vegas, you want the strip. If you want Vegas without that experience, you want Red Rock – though you could always take a shuttle down to the strip and get that experience on your terms. I do have to say though that you can get outstanding accommodations on the strip as well, the Venetian for instance has some amazing rooms if you upgrade a level or two. However, when you hit the casino, you will be inundated with the experience again.

The Red Rock Shuttle from the airport was a gorgeous drive… We left the airport and drove on some highway that appeared to have been built yesterday with a ton of other new development. I saw mountains… Mountains I say.

[Picture courtesy of our friend Sean Deuby]

So yes, Red Rock was definitely gorgeous, go out to their website, you will see how gorgeous. Here is another photo from our resident MVP shutter bug, Sean.

 

The People

Amazing people. You had the NetPro folks like Gil, Stella and of course Christine who makes you feel like the party couldn’t start with out you. There was a new NetPro person I met this year who seemed to be helping Stella out quite a bit, the very lovely and talented Michelle Maloof. I saw Stella smiling considerably more this DEC than in previous years so hopefully Michelle will continue helping Stella out for the DEC 2008. 🙂  Admit it Stella, you love me while hating me at the same time. 😉

You also have the other “normal” attendees, many of whom have amazing stories and tell you of things that they have encountered that maybe you never saw yourself. I have learned a great deal just in casual conversations with folks. Both in terms of things that I haven’t ever seen but also in learning how others encounter and deal with issues and what kinds of issues they have. As I have said to many folks, the types of issues that I and folks like Dean run into tend to be quite different from the problems of most admins. I like understanding the problems most admins have. That helps me figure out what I can help with.

On top of that you have a whole metric ton of MVPs and folks who are MVPs in my own head who could have it any time they want they just haven’t taken the time to get off their butt and get the official award. The likes of Ulf, Jorge, Dean, Guido, Darren, Sean, Katherine, JoeK, Hunter, and Stuart Fuller, and even Laura Hunter and Mark Arnold the special Exchange MVP.

Finally but not leastly (definitely not) you have the MSFT contingent… When I think of this group the first person who always comes to mind is my friend Stuart Kwan of the Ottawa Kwan Clan. And every time I think of Stuart I think of the first time I saw him back in the Whistler RAP in like 2002 or so maybe??? I went out to Redmond with some Ford folks and Stuart walked up to the front of the room and apologized that he was at low ebb due to being sick and then proceeded to blow my socks off with energy from I don’t know where. If his hands moved any faster I was afraid he would fly through the ceiling. Since then it has been one good experience after another. Outside of Stuart we had more MSFT participation this year than any other DEC I can recall. The amount of DS Dev Team folks was absolutely great. I hope they found enough value themselves in being there to do it again next year. I don’t think the “normal” attendees really understood the number and quality of people they had there. They had PMs for every major portion of AD in attendance and they had the luck to have Dmitri Gavrilov there as well. I expect the number of people who knew who he was was very small in relation to the number of people there, but someone that makes the MVPs all stand at attention should be a sign to anyone watching how major a role someone plays. We also were lucky to have a member of the Live team with us to present on AD (they’ll let anyone talk about it…). Well that member happened to be part of the AD BackSeat Architecture group (they have a DL and everything) – you will know him as ~Eric or Eric Fleischman. Eric is pretty well known in the AD Circles (and to readers of my blog) because he seems to be everywhere participating in every possible public communication channel. Dmitri on the other hand is out there as well, but he tends to be a little more focused on what he gets involved in. We also had the likes of Nathan Muggli, Stephanie Cheung, Moon, and Uday as well which may all be names you have heard of. Some of whom I was able to sit down and talk to at great length and some of whom I wanted to sit down with but couldn’t get untied enough to do so so folks expect me to be emailing you, especially you Stephanie. 🙂 The DS Platform team is really a very great team. Lots of very good people. I am proud to have some level of association with them. There were others there as well such as Brian Puhl, Robert DeLuca, Ulric, Nitin, and “Paul” Balarajan (Paul is quoted for inside joke) who were all great to chat with. I am not purposely trying to leave anyone out, my mind was shot by the time we got to Monday from lack of sleep.

 

 The Conference Facilities

Unfortunately I have to say I was less than thrilled here. I wasn’t too happy with the general layout, it was kind of spread out and too compressed all at the same time… Hard for me to explain it. Basically you had these semi-wide hallways that vendors tried to line up on the sides of with food/drinks in the middle and people had to sort of scoot past them. These hallways went off in different directions so either people gathered and it got to the point where no one could move or they went off into other areas. The big open hall in Vancouver and at Green Valley beat Red Rock here hands down. People could filter out of the sessions and mill around in the middle of the hall making many many magic conversation circles. They also had lots of sitting areas for people to sit around and chat if that is what they wanted too. There was also considerable issues with logistics in terms of what speakers were in what rooms and whether or not it made sense. Speakers with large crowds were stuck in smaller rooms, speakers with smaller crowds were in larger rooms. It was really quite frustrating. This hit the ultimate frustration when I went to go into the Stuart Kwan Keynote and instead of being in the big ballroom he was in a majorly reduced size room with a single entrance. I tried to get in but there were so many people already clustered around the doorway it just wasn’t going to happen. It was the only keynote I have missed from Stuart since attending DEC. I was extremely disappointed, especially as I look through the slide deck of his presentation and I see references to Dean and myself. I would love to have heard the context around that.

 

The Sunday Workshop

I have to say that this was rough. I showed up to check it out on Saturday afternoon and saw that there were “challenges”. On the positive side, there was hardware coming out of folks ears… A nice big HP SAN and a bunch of blades and memory enough to make a mainframe jealous. However the hotel power wasn’t quite up to the need initially and I distinctly recall one point where there was a lot of beeping from the SAN/Blade enclosure as someone ran a big heavy cart over the power lines and killed the power to the electronics. Yeah, not pretty. The MVPs working on the workshop guts kept a swinging though on through the night and stayed there the whole night trying to get things into place, knocking down one huge issue after another. Unfortunately, come the morning they still didn’t have it where they wanted so the session started out considerably less interactive than initially designed. That being said, I think the workshop as a whole was successful, I think a lot of people learned a lot of cool new stuff they didn’t know about before.

 

The Conference Overall

Dean and I mentioned a couple of years ago when we were in Vancouver that we thought that DEC *might* be getting too large. I am not positive but I think we have hit that now. I understand that it was necessarily going to grow, that means that acceptance of the technology is taking off more and more. However the conference has also expanded into MIIS, ADFS, RMS, etc. While I am sure there were some or even many that appreciated that, I spoke to many who didn’t. It was sort of like diluting food coloring by adding too much water or blowing up a red balloon until it was pink. The magic circles which I loved about previous DECs were not as frequent, or at least I didn’t run into them as frequently which further enticed me to stay “closer to home” and hang with my normal clique of people. The circles I did walk up to were discussing ADFS/RMS/MIIS and quite frankly, I don’t care about those technologies in the slightest. The closest out of those is MIIS and as I keep saying to folks inside of MSFT, until it runs on ESE I don’t see myself using it much. Too many other products that can do what I need that don’t require SQL Server. As for ADFS… once it does fat clients I will find it more sexy and spend some time on it, until then, I don’t care. Stuart is one of the big guys in that space so it hurts me to say that but I really don’t care too much about the web stuff, Sharepoint is a big pain in the ass and I don’t do Web App Dev – so why should I care about ADFS. RMS…. Bah don’t get me started there but I have some songs I downloaded from Urge that I payed for that I can’t copy between machines and use unless I burn to CD and then rip back to MP3. To me RMS means, give up control of your PC, I have no desire to do that. Even though MSFT has seen fit to brand all of these things as “Active Directory” for a marketing edge, it doesn’t, to me, mean they should be full tracks at DEC.

Possibly the conference facilities are the issue that caused the loss of the magic circles? Possibly it was the dilution of the true AD technology? Possibly it was the overall size? I don’t know, I just know that family feeling I liked so much about DEC in the past was not there for me this year. Quite a few people I spoke with felt the same way. There were lots of people that I wanted to see, expected to see, that I never ran into. Looking over the list of attendees I saw even more people I wanted to see that I hadn’t seen in years and didn’t see them either.

Since reducing the size of DEC likely isn’t an option, I am hoping that the next forum will not have the same impact on extra-sessional gathering. I think possibly getting more segregation between the tracks may assist in removing some of the dilution. I would be curious to know how much cross track attendance there really was. The only cross-track session I saw that had any interest for me was about ADAM and quite frankly, that should have been in the AD Tracks, not MIIS/ADFS or wherever it landed.

 

Conference Sessions

As a whole, these were very good. There was a serious focus on RODCs and I think that bothered some people but the coverage doesn’t surprise me as it is the biggest feature to hit AD since AD itself hit. I don’t think some companies realize HOW much this will change how they deploy DCs or at least how I visualize they will deploy DCs. The security exposure of AD goes down considerably with RODCs and I expect to see far greater DC deployments with RODCs. RODCs have been discussed by MSFT since at least DEC 2004 in Washington DC when Stuart first started asking folks what they thought of the idea. The initial idea was caching DCs like caching DNS servers which I adored but that was quickly squashed and RODCs became the goal.

There were several sessions I wanted to attend but the rooms were just overpacked so I ended up in other sessions or just hung out chatting with folks in the halls. My favorite session was done by ~Eric Fleischman where he talked about scaling Active Directory. It was a good session. I tried to submit a few DCRs in the session as innocent questions. Dean ended up outing me on one of them. Eric speaks well, I can’t recall now how long I have known him but it has been an enjoyable experience overall and I have met with him personally on several occasions now and what people saw in the session is who Eric is though he did try to pin him down to the level of the session more than he might do in a real life conversation. You can be talking to Eric and all of a sudden have your eyes glaze over as he hits some level of abstraction that is so abstract you no longer can see the original problem. You want an interesting discussion, sit down and talk to Eric about what AD looks like 10 years from now.

Actually Dean, myself, and a couple of other MVPs sat down and spoke with Nathan, Eric, and Dmitri the last day over lunch about the next 10 years. They have some very interesting ideas on where it is going and interestingly they seemed to fall in line with where I thought they should be going though I was looking at a completely different form of implementation than they were as I was basing things on what I see today or small advances from what I see today whereas they build this stuff, they can make it look like anything they want and their 10 year thoughts illustrate that. To state my basic opinion, I see Centralized IT as being dead for managing policy and process in the future. It just doesn’t make sense, IT doesn’t have the knowledge to make the decisions so don’t own the decisions nor the resources, why are they in the middle of everything? Because that is the cheapest/securest model at the moment, or that is what we seem to think. IT should be running systems and making sure they function, period. That is where we have to go in the x years.

 

Next Year

As always, there is always a next year. I hope it will bounce back from what it was this year. I have heard the “tentative” city, I am not sure if it is something I can share. However I can say that I hope the real city ends up being in Hawaii or the Yucatan peninsula. That would rock. I loved sitting around the pool discussing super high level tech stuff with really intelligent people and those are two places I would really like to do it. I also wouldn’t mind being flown down to Australia for it. While I recently saw a show that makes Australia as one of the most dangerous places in the world in terms of small critters than can kill you in painful ways, I have heard so much about it from so many people and how they all think I would fit in so well that I would really like to check it out. My one fear is that I would go and then decide to never return though.

Dean and I tentatively, yes TENTATIVELY, signed up for the “joe and Dean Show Part Deux”. The interest really did seem to be there for it. While I am not one who generally likes presenting, if we can figure out a way where we are all just chatting, that would be good. Dean and I discussed some ideas while sitting by the pool. Mostly I was thinking up humourous things that could be put into the slide deck, maybe I should leave tech entirely and just get into standup as I mostly just seem to want to make people laugh and smile. If you crack a joke poorly, the worse thing that can happen is they say you aren’t funny. But if you present something that isn’t right people can say you are an idiot. 🙂 I like to think my mom didn’t raise no idiots, stacks of evidence to the contrary aside… =)

 

   joe

 

 

[1] I presume to see if I tore anyone’s head off and ate their entrails. Note that it is entirely a rumour that I am that mean; I really am a pretty nice guy for the most part. I just happen to not hold back opinions when I have one and that can unnerve people. Not that I am always right, but if I don’t think something is correct and my opinion or level of caring is high enough I will counter. Don’t agree with me, argue, debate, tell me what you think.

[2] I didn’t work directly with him, we both worked for the same company supporting the servers for another company. I was in the US and he was in England but what I did was generally global in nature and definitely had impact on nearly everyone supporting servers for that company.