Last week was NetPro’s annual Directory Experts Conference (DEC), an event that anyone connected with Microsoft identity, networking and directory technologies should attend. Over the years I’ve seen the attendance grow from dozens to the over 800 folks who attended this time. Particularly noteworthy are the number of Microsoft employees who go, not to make presentations or do marketing, but to get a better understanding of their own company’s technologies.

This year’s event was kicked off with two and a half days of workshops put together by NetPro CTO Gil Kirkpatrick and the U.K.-based Oxford Computer Group. I found time to sit in on the sessions on “MIIS 2003 And Identity Lifecycle Management 2007” and the “Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) Workshop” which were both head and shoulders above other so-called “training” sessions I’ve been to recently.

Oxford Director James Booth was formerly with Microsoft and, before that, with Zoomit – the creator of metadirectory technology and the “incubator” that gave us Microsoft’s Kim Cameron and Quest’s Jackson Shaw, who both frequently appear in this newsletter. Kirkpatrick’s all-day session, called “The Longhorn Active Directory Workshop,” was standing-room only, I hear, and an eye-opening introduction to the new server operating system.

There was a lot of interesting stuff at the rest of the conference, stuff I’ll look in more depth in the Identity Management newsletter but right now I want to talk about the latest Wook Lee challenge.

Each year at DEC, Microsoft’s Stuart Kwan, group program manager, federated identity and security, challenges HP directory architect Wook Lee to come up with a bit of poetry, doggerel, or other rhyming work focusing on some aspect of Microsoft directory technology. This year – even though Lee had to cancel a trip to the event at the last minute due to a pressing problem with a client – was no different. Kwan challenged, and Lee delivered by telephone and PowerPoint. The challenge was for Lee to re-watch the Muppet Movie and create a work to the tune of the opening number, “The Rainbow Connection”, performed by Kermit the Frog on the topic of “Secure Authentication”! Wook not only delivered the work, but constructed a karaoke version in PowerPoint so that everyone in the audience could sing along. You can too if you play the music while singing Wook’s words:

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