A small conference with big offerings

Last week was the bi-annual European version of The Experts Conference put on by Quest Software following their acquisition of NetPro last year. This was my first conference since the acquisition and since the previously yclept Directory Experts Conference had been renamed The Experts Conference (this spring) and a second track about Microsoft Exchange had been added to the original identity track (actually, it was originally simply about Active Directory).

Let me say right up-front that I noticed no differences due to either change. Admittedly I paid no attention to the goings on of the Exchange people, but that's also a good indication that it didn't impact what was happening in the identity track at all. Nor could any evidence of a change in management be observed. Sure, there was a distinct Quest presence, but many of those in the Quest shirts had been wearing NetPro shirts the last time I was at the conference. And the show was organized and run   by the same triumvirate that has been doing this for many years: Gil Kirkpatrick, the father, or at least the progenitor, of TEC; Christine McDermott, who could be called the "head gardener" because of the way she's nurtured and grown the conference over the years; and Stella DeJean, the "fairy godmother" of TEC who, it seems, only needs to wave her magic wand to solve any logistical problem that might arise (like finding coffee for sleep-deprived journalists). Once again they did a wonderful job.

This show also is outstanding evidence of my theory that the smaller conferences (in terms of number of attendees and sessions) can be the ones with the meatiest content. There were never more than two sessions going on simultaneously, yet I frequently had the devil of a time picking one over the other. In contrast, at larger shows with six to 10 simultaneous sessions I often find no topic that draws my interest.

At a show like TEC, the presenters are often the people directly responsible for the product under discussion while the audience is invariably made of those who do (or plan to) utilize it. The give and take is almost as interesting as the actual presentation. And the presentations are right on the edge -- as one example, Kirkpatrick's session on auditing Microsoft's Forefront Identity Manager 2010 was based on Release Candidate 0 (RC0), then updated (including cross-outs, overwrites and indicated deletions) for RC1, which isn't yet publicly available (although due any day now).

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