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That will be the last time I say that… I promise. Yes I hate the name TEC… There I said it… I HATE THE NAME. I put this name change right there with ADLDS instead of ADAM… But I will stop.

So this was the first Experts Conference put on by Quest since they bought NetPro. Who here has dealt with Quest in the past, specifically the Quest Sales Team members? Raise your hand. One fear that I had was along the lines of Quest turning what has always been an awesome technical conference and all around great get together of techies, nerds, and geeks who were friends into a big giant marketing junket.

I expect this was a common fear because the whole shebang started off with an opening video on the big screens that was generally about Quest and world domination, etc and had Gil stepping in and say whoa whoa wait a minute… That isn’t what this is about. I loved that they made fun of that fear showing they recognized it and acknowledged it and wanted to put it to bed as fast as possible.

But the question remained, was it ‘for real’? Well I can say… It was. And that seriously surprised me. As I walked around D… TEC, not once was I accosted by a salesperson from Quest. No one jumped out from around a corner, no one tried to trap me, no one said, hey how about I give you a free pass to a Vegas show and you sit in a room as we try to sell you something for a couple of hours (at least no one at the conference did that – the Strip was another story…) 

Now let me tell you, I have been talking to Quest sales folks for many years, probably seven or so? This is in the context as the lead tech resource for several very large companies while Quest was trying to sell them something. While the technical resources I have met with on the sales calls[1] have all been a pleasure to talk to[2], the sales guys were all a bit over the top if you know what I mean. I know that there had to be some serious wrangling somewhere inside of Quest before TEC came along to get the sales sharks to not be their normal piranha like selves. I don’t know, maybe they didn’t invite the sales people, I am not sure, but whatever they did was perfect. If I wanted to talk about products Quest had for sale there was a special room I could walk into with all of the other vendors and I could talk about whatever I wanted. But if I wanted to avoid them, I could do that as well.

I realize I just burned up a large chunk of the post so far but that was a big concern of mine when I decided to attend. Again, I have dealt with several members of the Quest Sales team in the past, they aren’t a calm accepting bunch. Anyway, on to other topics…

Vegas!!! Or at least Henderson anyway… What can you say about that? I can say low 70’s and a boat load of sun beats out snow and freezing temperatures in Chicago. I think they learned their lesson and we won’t see Chicago or likely anywhere else cold again for TEC. I know many companies don’t want to send their employees on Vegas boondoggles (why spend on that when they can send the Execs on Hawaiian boondoggles instead…) however the funny thing about Vegas and nerds is that they still show up at the sessions, they still sit and chat with the other nerds.

This isn’t a bunch of realtors or insurance salespeople who go to Vegas for a conference and then never even know where the conference is at because they are drunk and falling over in the strip clubs the whole time. These are hard core nerds who would rather sit in a chat about replication issues than at a card table. They would rather try to understand Brett talking about the intricacies of JET/ESE than sit at a slot machine. They would rather listen to Dmitri talking about the various fields of Access Control Entry Structure than see the Blue Man Group banging on drums. Why? Because the info you can get at TEC isn’t info you are going to get anywhere or anywhen else[3] and you can play cards, play slots, or see the Blue Man Group anytime. I don’t care how many other conferences you go to, I don’t care which ones they are, you will not get the quality of info concerning AD and Windows Identity that you do at TEC. You won’t get the friendly feeling, you won’t get the speakers and MVPs and Microsoft employees sitting around in bean bags chatting comfortably as peers with the attendees. Pamela Dingle wrote up a great experience post here – http://eternallyoptimistic.com/2009/03/26/tec-and-the-targeted-conference-value-proposition/ which I completely agree with as evidenced by my comment to her post.

Obviously, due to the financial conditions around the business world, the attendance was down but it was still great attendance. Microsoft wasn’t able to send as many people but the Softies that did attend were some of the crème de la crème and the folks the DS MVPs really enjoy seeing at the MVP summits. You had Dean formerly of the Dean and joe Show, you had James McColl who “owns” the DS Power Shell extensions, you had Nathan “Mr. RODC” Muggli, you had Dmitri Gavrilov who has touched so many parts of the AD and ADAM source that it is impossible for anyone to manage the directories without using something Dmitri worked on, you had Brett Shirley who is literally one of a few people who can read, let alone write the ESE code which is the underpinning Database for AD and Exchange as well as DHCP and WINS and so many things on the Vista or Windows 7 machine[4] you are reading this posting on that you would be shocked. Of course we had Stuart Kwan with his keynote and the challenges he issues every TEC. You may recall last year’s challenge was to produce a movie poster that incorporated various MVPs and Microsoft folks about AD Forest Recovery… the response was

This year the challenge was to produce a song based on an Elvis song that had lyrics exploring our top requests for the next releases of product from Microsoft. These are the lyrics…

(sung to the tune of Elvis Presley’s “Blue Suede Shoes”)

v.1 was the money
v.2 for the show
v.3 got you ready, now go go go

So don’t you
Recycle my new OU
You can do anything
But can you RTM ILM 2?

Can you give us some prune and
Can you give us some graft?
You better make us happy
So don’t give us the shaft.
took a purdy name and you made it a mess
Leave it as ADAM, not LDS

So don’t you
Recycle my new OU
You can do anything
But can you RTM ILM 2?

Now that you’ve got – an Identity Suite
Gimme some lovin on schema delete,
I need multi-domain on a single DC
I’m talkin’ ‘bout writable not a GC

So don’t you
Recycle my new OU
You can do anything
But can you RTM ILM 2?

Who killed LDAP, and didn’t tell me.
What the hell’s a web-service doin’ on a DC.
Give me a GUI, not command-line hell
I need a management solution, not Power—-WHAT?!?

….

So don’t you
Recycle my new OU
You can do anything
But can you RTM ILM 2?

Several folks got together at Midnight on Tuesday night to sing this in front of a camera, I can’t be sure but I think alcohol played a role and I distinctly recall seeing Dean with a pink scarf wrapped around his head in it when I watched it. I think someone (Sean??) will post it some time in the near future so you can see this work of art as sung by the creators.

Because I love my buddy Dean I want to call out his session in particular. 🙂 The Dean and James presentation was good, I won’t say it was as good as the Dean and joe Show but admittedly Dean was working with far more constrained material than we had to work with. Certainly I think James is a far more polished presenter than I am so that was good. Their presentation seemed to go over well but I am not sure everyone understood everything about the implementation and how far down the road the stuff they were talking about was. Hopefully everyone saw in some way shape or form the Joe Kaplan and Brandon Shell presentation on what you can do with Power Shell against Active Directory right now today. Also unfortunately no one asked the question I really wanted to hear asked and answered that I mentioned previously… The question about bytes on the wire when retrieving the description or even better userAccountControl or security descriptor of 50,000 or so users… Anyway the stuff that JoeK and Bwandon were showing off was good stuff and available right this second and uses LDAP which I consider a huge win over the stuff coming in Windows Server 2008 R2 (sorry Dennis, I still don’t feel there is anything compelling in my environments). As JoeK said, the AD PS stuff is Vaporware and as Bwandon said, they aren’t even delivering what Quest delivered two years ago. Its a strategic decision…

I also wanted to call out Brett’s sessions. I only got to see one of his sessions in its entirety but it was very good. Brett is fighting a couple of major issues with his presentations. The first is that he is really very smart and has forgotten more about ESE/JET than any of the rest of us will likely every know. It is difficult to slow down and speak to people who don’t have seriously deep experience with a product if you live deeply in that product, at least IMO. Coupled with that is the second point which is that ESE/JET has pretty purposely been kept as a black box all of these years. It is literally shown as a little box at the bottom of AD architecture docs and you simply see “ESE” and nothing else. So when Brett started talking about ESE and really started getting into it, it was a topic that most people didn’t even have a casual background on other than some occasional key words here and there like ISAM or B-Tree or Version Store. I admit that I was listening and often thinking “wow I don’t have the slightest clue what he is talking about”. I hope we see Brett again next year presenting again and hopefully more people will be more informed with what ESE is and the terms he is using. Also maybe he can come down just a little out of the deeper parts of the box and talk more specifically about the pieces of ESE/JET where we feel pain and that can be directly translated to ESE/JET components such as maybe the Version Store issues we had with Active Directory prior to LVR replication. I think a lot of people could use to hear more about the actual physical layout of AD in the database as well such as the relationships between DNTs, PDNTs, NCDNTs, etc. Brett’s presentation was my favorite and I wish it could have been about 4-5 hours because learning more about ESE/JET is something I would like to do.

Unfortunately I do have a complaint about TEC this year that I think heard enough times outside of myself that it should be mentioned here. The problem was around session scheduling. There was a lot of collisions in the schedule that I didn’t think were very good. Obviously scheduling something like this has to be an incredible pain and very difficult at a core level but it needs more work. I think possibly something that would be good to do is to have everyone select the sessions they are interested in seeing and then put popular sessions up against less popular sessions. What we had this year was multiple well known personalities going up against each other in the same time slots and people complaining that they wanted to see both (or more) but obviously could only attend one. One that really irked me was Brett and Dmitri both presenting at the same time. I absolutely wanted to be in both sessions but obviously couldn’t so tried to split my time between them which was wholly unsatisfactory. So I would have an hour and half period where I couldn’t figure out which session I wanted to see because I wanted to see several and then I would have an hour and half that I didn’t want to see any of the sessions. Again, I understand how difficult this problem could be to try and solve and make everyone happy but I think putting all of the well known folks in the same track at least may be a good start so you don’t have to choose Guido or Dean, Brian Puhl or Brian Desmond, Dmitri or Brett, Joe Kaplan or Darren, etc.

I was talking with some folks at TEC on a couple of occasions and I started speaking out about comments that had popped up in my head at some point that TEC is almost the Microsoft MVP Summit Part Deux. I get a very similar feeling from it. Most of the folks reading this won’t really understand what that means because they aren’t MVPs but trust me that this is a very good thing. The summit is open honest direct content sharing between Microsoft and the MVPs and feedback about what was shared – both ways. When the summit is before TEC, then the MVPs who present are bringing that information straight to TEC and presenting it to the non-MVPs which is great for both Microsoft and for the attendees. That allows the Microsoft folks to watch the MVPs and see how well their messages got through from the summit which I expect gives them the opportunity to tweak the messages they are trying to put out there as well as correct things that were misunderstood. But also, since you have so many MVPs and the same Microsoft people there, the same feeling of the MVP summit and the easy open communication between Microsoft and the summit attendees rolls over into TEC which I think has a tangible positive impact on the conference as a whole. People are in a better mood and more willing to talk and share and actually “communicate” when they are comfortable and the Softies and the MVPs are very comfortable with each other and that translates to a better experience for everyone at TEC. 

Thanks have to go out to Christine and Gil and Stella and everyone else that was involved with putting on such an important function. They need to pat themselves on the back and kick their feet up and let out a sigh of happiness. Bravo.

Well to wrap this post up, as always, I very much enjoyed TEC and while I may get “ho hum” or “can’t possibly do it” about going every year because of my obligations and other issues I am always end up being very glad that I come. I wish I could bring my entire Active Directory Staff I work with in my day job because I think there is something for all of them and it will just make them better at their jobs. It comes down to the fact that I love the people, plain and simple. Everyone is always extremely polite and respectful and for the most part interesting. There is such a wide variety of people using AD in such a wide variety of ways it is interesting to hear the various viewpoints. Don’t let anyone tell you anything different… TEC is about the people. It is about the interconnections and the hallway discussions. As I tell people, as a general rule the learning just starts in the conference rooms, it really gets going in the hallways and after the official sessions when people really start talking about how what they saw in the sessions personally impacted them and how they worked around it. I had people asking me questions on stuff from the Dean and joe Show from 2006 and I believe they felt fully comfortable to do it and who knows how long they were thinking about doing that… What other conference out there now has such history and continuity that that could happen?

     joe

[1] In fact the first time I met Darren Mar-Elia he was the CTO of Quest and had flown out to see me and some others at the Widget factory I used to work at and to this day I still consider Darren a good friend even though he has an unnatural tendency towards all things GPO…

[2] And Darren isn’t the only great technical type person I have spoken with from Quest, there are lots. That company has some serious brain power in it and some very good people that I am always happy to see.

[3] Unless you are a Microsoft MVP and you get to go to the Summit at Microsoft which is an invitation only NDA event.

[4] Search your machine for edb.chk files, every one of those is part of an ESE Database.