Time for spring -- and conference season

The foundation for security and enterprise management

Wow, it's March all ready. Where has the year gone? Time to start gearing up for the conference season -- which already started with the recent RSA Security conference in San Francisco and last week's Gartner Identity and Access Management Summit in London. I didn't make it to either one of them.

Two I will make are coming up soon.

Top 10 RSA security innovators

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Wow, it's March all ready. Where has the year gone? Time to start gearing up for the conference season -- which already started with the recent RSA Security conference in San Francisco and last week's Gartner Identity and Access Management Summit in London. I didn't make it to either one of them.

Two I will make are coming up soon.

Top 10 RSA security innovators

First is The Experts Conference on April 25-28 in Los Angeles. This conference, which used to be the Directory Experts Conference, is a must for the IT people who run your Active Directory-related identity systems. This year there are three tracks: Directory and Identity, Exchange and SharePoint. This is the place to get the inside skinny on Microsoft's identity and security systems from the people who create them. This one is always a sellout, so register now.

For my friends in Europe, or those who want to be in Bavaria for Spargelfest, the European Identity Conference in Munich  from May 4-7 is a must. Once again, as last year, the fine folks at Kuppinger, Cole + Partner have invited me to present an opening keynote address as well as hosting two session tracks.

On Tuesday (May 4), I'll keynote on "Convergence: Better Control, Lower Cost". Since it's the keynote talk between a break and Kim Cameron, I should at least get those who want to come early to get a good seat for Kim!

On Wednesday (May 5), I'll continue the convergence theme with a track called "Value Through Convergence -- Consolidate for Better Value, Efficiency and Security".This will feature a conversation with Martin Kuppinger ("5 Quick-Wins to Leverage your Existing Identity Infrastructure through Convergence"), a conversation with Kim Cameron ("Converging User-centric and Enterprise-centric IDs") and two panel discussions: "Converging Data Governance and Access Governance" and "Establishing an Advanced Level of Enterprise Identity Maturity."

On Thursday (May 6) I'll tackle "Cloud Platforms and Data Portability". This track will feature an intro talk ("Data Statelessness and the Continuum of Individuals' Data Portability on the Web") by XMLgrrl herself, Eve Maler. We'll follow this up with two great panels: "Social Data Portability" and "Business/Cloud portability."

There'll be other great sessions -- there always are. Plus, the Deutsches Museum in Munich is a fabulous venue. I hope to see you there.

One conference I won't be attending, unfortunately, is the Catalyst conference in Prague (April 19-22). This will be the first Catalyst since the Burton Group was acquired by Gartner and it will be interesting to see what changes -- if any -- will happen.

Read more about security in Network World's Security section.

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