The world famous Directory Experts Conference will be going on in Las Vegas (well just outside of Las Vegas) in one week. The festivities officially start on Sunday morning with a Longhorn Workshop where the newest joeware utility will make its public debut – PSOMgr – the one and only tool currently available for easily managing the Password Settings Objects in Longhorn Server. Microsoft actually mentioned PSOMgr on one of their knowledge sharing sessions recently that I was busy developing the tool and it would be released at DEC 2007. If I do say so myself it is a pretty cool utility for a pretty cool new feature in Longhorn – granular password policy or I think the official name is FGPP – which is either Frelling Great Password Policy or Fine Grain Password Policy – I’m not sure which. I have received some positive feedback so far from some of the Microsoft folks who took some time to peek at the utility. It is truly very nice to hear people from Microsoft that I respect saying I am doing a good job with the software I write. The best part of the utility for most is that like all of the other joeware… it is free (well as free as a download).
But back to DEC. DEC is pretty cool, I have mentioned it before and I will mention it again in the future. It is the only conference that I am aware of that focuses on Active Directory as the primary topic. Of course they have added sessions on MIIS the last few years and ADFS this year but let’s face it, all of the cool people are there for Active Directory. I won’t mind going there for MIIS (or in fact actually using MIIS) just as soon as Microsoft starts listening to me and putting ESE under MIIS instead of SQL Server or at least offering a choice of DB technologies with ESE as one of the choices. More people in this world use ESE every day than SQL Server, period, I mean it isn’t even close. Anyway, DEC is the only place you are going to go to get together a ton of people who live, breath, and really work with AD every day.
DEC, like any conference, has good sessions and bad sessions, good presenters and bad presenters, it sometimes even has great presenters (alas Dean was too busy this year…). But where DEC really shines is the time between the sessions and the social events at the end of each of the days. This is when a lot of very cool people all get together and talk about whatever cool things they have encountered recently or thoughts they have come up with or you get to watch real live corporate network production administrators VPN Dean into their networks as Enterprise Admin and let him fix things while he is sipping Glenlivet and water. I very truly enjoy that banter and chatter. You also get to hob knob with a good number of the people (and personalities) who are answering many of the questions on the ActiveDir.org listserv. Honestly, I think that this hobnobbing is what fellow DS MVP Gil Kirkpatrick, the ever efficient Stella, and the ever charming Christine, the great folks behind DEC really have in mind in having these conferences. The sessions are a great way to learn but I think in a great part they are to just to get people thinking and talking in the right direction because every year, I hear the same comments… The sessions were good but the conversations between the sessions or during the social events were amazing! And it isn’t the entertainment or the Up All Night Hacking session that actually went until 9PM or any of that stuff, it is, again, the people who do the real work in the trenches talking to other people who do real work in the trenches. There is a tremendous opportunity for people to learn stuff they may not likely hear anywhere else or to ask questions they can’t seem to find answers to anywhere else.
I really didn’t think I was going to make it this year because I have been amazingly busy compared to previous years since last summer but my very cool boss stood up and said, “yes, joe should be going to that conference…” and got the time and travel approved for me. Dean also wasn’t going to be able to make it but somehow got the time freed up to go as well so we will both be there milling about – if you are there, you will almost certainly see us – one of us is handsome, the other is English. Personally I think Dean worked out how to get there just because I was going to be there. 🙂 Whatever the reason it works out well as it isn’t the same without Dean running around and it allows me to sit back and just listen as Dean likes to do all of the talking. 🙂
joe
