Where to get Active Directory expertise

If you’re still planning your seminar, conference and trade show calendar for the year, be sure to keep in mind NetPro’s Directory Experts’ Conference coming up in March (in Washington, D.C.) and April (in Amsterdam, The Netherlands). Both shows focus on Active Directory and its place in the enterprise. This year’s theme is “Interoperability & Integration: Connecting Your IT Infrastructure with Active Directory.”

Sessions will include advanced technical presentations, interactive roundtables, and panel discussions covering policies and practices for Active Directory interoperability and integration using Active Directory itself as well as Active Directory Application Mode (ADAM) and Microsoft Identity Information Server (MIIS). Other topics will include design, security and disaster recovery.

After last year’s conferences I asked those who attended to write to let me know what they thought. Here’s just one, random, selection from the responses I got:

“I was one of the lucky guys who was able to attend the DEC in Ottawa. You’re asking whether or not something interesting was presented out there … pfffffff … where should I start ;-)? The overall quality of the sessions were outstanding. One of the important pieces of information that was presented at the DEC had to do with the security boundary aspect of Active Directory. It has become very clear that a forest forms the security boundary and not a domain. This is not really news, but what was new were the nitty gritty details how to bypass the domain as a security boundaries and the consequences this has for a lot of corporations (multiple forest implementations!). To DEC or not to DEC? That’s no question – ;-)”

Back to entertain and enlighten you once again will be Stuart Kwan, product unit manager for Microsoft’s Directory Services, and Wook Lee, directory service architect at HP. (Check out https://www.nwfusion.com/newsletters/dir/2003/0922id2.html for more of Lee’s talents.) Also at the conferences will be most of the directory products gurus from Redmond with support from their colleagues at HP and Cisco, along with a good cross-section of your peers – folks implementing “interesting” projects with Active Directory.

The U.S. conference takes place March 21-24 at the Hyatt Regency in Reston, Va., while the European edition is scheduled for April 25-28 at the Renaissance Amsterdam Hotel. You can get all the details – and register now – at https://www.netpro.com/

If at all possible, plan to get to the D.C. event site on Saturday, March 20. Planned for March 21 is a visit to the newest of the Smithsonian museums, the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center at Washington Dulles International Airport. This features a 760,057-square-foot building on 176.5 acres housing, among other exhibits, the space shuttle Enterprise; an SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance aircraft; the Dash 80 prototype of the Boeing 707; the world war II B-29 Superfortress “Enola Gay”; and an Air France Concorde. The center also features an IMAX theatre that will showcase films such as Shackleton’s Antarctic Adventure and Straight Up: Helicopters in Action. It’s a side trip you won’t want to miss. Just don’t mention that part to your boss when you’re getting the travel approved. And, remember, if you need to know about Active Directory then you need to be at DEC.