I just wanted to take a moment to send out a general thanks to the Active Directory Product Group at Microsoft. I always enjoy seeing the team as a whole but really enjoy the individual talk time with the PM’s and Devs even more. My favorite time for this summit was the open session where we got to sit and discuss the Recycle Bin feature stuff with Tim and Stephanie. Not because I think it is the only cool feature or anything, but because I really enjoyed the open discussion and it was nice to learn the technical details behind a feature that has been so long in coming.
Uday and Moon, your presence was missed. Also I will miss seeing a large portion of the DS Team at DEC/TEC… Unfortunately it seems only a few of the DS Team will be able to make it to DEC/TEC due to budget cutbacks at MSFT. This is unfortunate because I often hear from the attendees that they really appreciate the availability of the Microsoft DS Team resources at DEC to respond to questions and hear feedback. Since this is the only conference with solid real deep focus on the DS pieces this is the best conference for Microsoft to send those resources but someone at some level doesn’t seem to understand that.
It was odd having my good friend Dean over on the other side of the fence as a Microsoft employee but I think it was good and he did Microsoft proud. I had a lovely time visiting with him and his wife (hmmm good meatballs) and awesome son (Hello Lucas… volcano!!!).
Just a quick FYI for those who kept asking me… The fact that Dean is working on PowerShell a lot now is not going to sway my opinion on it. Again, sorry to all those who asked me that specific direct question… but no. Not even for Dean. 🙂 I will or will not use PowerShell when it becomes compelling specifically for me to use. This isn’t to say it isn’t the right answer for others, but that is for each individual to decide. I doubt there is anything that can be presented or said in a single presentation that could get any serious folks to just jump whole hog, this will be something admins choose to do or not based on their own thoughts, needs, and preferences. I found it odd when asked by some of the PM’s if I was just all of a sudden going to change my mind on it because of a good presentation. Does anyone make up their mind on whether they will change directions based on a good presentation? Once I need to do something that isn’t truly feasible for me to do (by my definition, no one else’s) in perl or command line tools that I have or can write, I will maybe look in that direction. More on the PowerShell stuff and specifically the DS Team’s AD and ADAM cmdlets for PowerShell in a later blog post.
Also a general thanks to the overall MVP program for having the Global Summit. It is always useful to me and this year by moving the Executive presentations to the end it really made me feel like my time was used well.
joe
