* News about Directory Experts Conference, Active Directory
A couple of interesting announcements landed on my desk last week, both involving Active Directory. I’ll get to those in a moment, but I first wanted to point out that – for those of you with Microsoft TechNet subscriptions – the New Vista operating system is available for you to download and test out for free. Well, free if you have a TechNet Plus subscription – but that’s probably something you should have anyway.
My fried Gil Kirkpatrick, CTO at NetPro has finally released the speaker lineup for the upcoming Directory Experts Conference, the annual event that showcases the best and the brightest as regards the network directory system we all love, and often loathe. Still, you need to work with Active Directory, you need to understand it, deploy it and maintain it so you might as well have the best information.
Among the 30 speakers announced are a number of old friends and familiar faces:
* Kim Cameron, architect of Identity and Access in the Connected Systems Division at Microsoft.
* Peter Houston, senior director, identity and access product management, Microsoft.
* Stuart Kwan, group program manager, federated identity and security, Microsoft.
* Robert DeLuca, program manager, Microsoft.
* Andreas Luther, program manager, Microsoft.
* James Booth and Craig Martin, directors, Oxford Computer Group.
* Jan De Clercq, senior member technical staff, HP Security Office.
* Wook Lee, architect/engineer, HP IT.
* Guido Grillenmeier, senior consultant, MS Services, HP.
* Danny Kim, CTO, FullArmor.
* Brad Turner, technical architect, Ensynch.
* Brian Puhl, senior systems engineer, Microsoft.
Make your plans now to be there in April.
Something you’ll be able to use much sooner is version 3 of the Blackbird Group’s DeTroubler. This tool streamlines the backup and recovery process for directory services. It can save your organization hours, even days in the recovery process – and that’s the real test of a backup system, isn’t it?
DeTroubler eliminates the need for you to perform time-consuming, manual tasks like recreating links between objects or re-entering encrypted information. It offers granular recovery options, individual users and their attributes can be quickly restored and, as a result, recovery is a more transparent process with minimal impact to the end users. But the cherry on this sundae is the scope of DeTroubler – it handles both Active Directory (and ADAM – Active Directory, Application Mode) as well as Novell’s eDirectory – which many of you chose to use in the early days of this century, before AD was fully baked. In fact, you can handle both directory systems simultaneously from the same platform and console. That might make a difference to some of you. Get more detail – and download a free eval – from Blackbird’s Web site.
Well, that’s all for this year. Happy holidays to you all and come back in early January when we’ll take a look at the tumultuous year of 2006 and gaze ahead into the always foggy crystal ball.
