I had a note from a reader a few weeks ago which, I think, asks a question that could be of interest to many of you. Lance Peterman wrote to get a recommendation. Not of a product, I hasten to add, but of a conference.

He wrote: “The reason I'm writing is that there may prove to be an opportunity for myself to attend a conference related to IAM [identity and access management] in the near future. What I would like to solicit is your opinion as to which one would be best for my overall experience. Our company is very new to this space and will be starting with very little already in place as far as implementing an IAM suite.” He then noted his company’s area and his previous experience with identity issues. Now I’ve noted in the past that there are differences among the major (and minor – but minor only in terms of the number of attendees) conferences and that while some of us are blessed (or cursed) with the need and/or ability to attend most, many people are limited in the amount of money their employers are willing to spend on what some bean counters still see as “junkets”.

Since I’ve recently started adding an “upcoming events” section to some (but not all) issues of the newsletter this seems like an ideal time to focus some events and who they might benefit.

Right at the top of the list are user conferences. Events like Courion’s Converge conference or the now, alas, defunct Technical Advisory Council meetings that Thor Technologies used to throw before it was sucked up by Oracle. If you’re using an identity product and the vendor offers an annual meeting for users, then by all means plan to attend. This is true not only for the specialist vendors, such as Courion, which are involved exclusively with identity issues but also for the more generalist organizations such as Oracle, Novell, Sun, RSA, CA and Microsoft. With the bigger companies, though, check the agenda for their meeting before committing to go. If, for example, Novell’s BrainShare agenda shows a very heavy emphasis on Linux with only a token representation for Identity Manager then you might be better off skipping that show and going to one of the big identity focused events.

The big events are the Burton Group’s Catalyst Conference, Digital ID World and (possibly) the Gartner Group’s Identity Summit. I say “possibly” for the Gartner event because there’s only been one held so far and it didn’t get terrific reviews. Let’s contrast that event with Catalyst.

Dave Kearns is a consultant and editor of IdM, the Journal of Identity Management.