Enabling Secure Remote access in your Environment - Steve Riley
Yes, I just went to this one because Steve Riley is a good/amusing speaker. Every time I've been to one of his talks, I cringe when I think about some of the security we have at work. We have a lot of remote access entry points - VPN, web mail, etc etc, and not a lot of security around them. Anyhow, not a lot of new stuff in this talk, but it was fairly interesting nonetheless. It would have been much more enjoyable without the lanky tard behind me talking and kicking the back of my chair, but oh well, you get that. *
Migrating from IBM Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Collaboration Solutions - Charlie Chung
I admit that I went to this session just for a laugh. The speaker spoke well, but really the slides weren't too well researched. I know the "Notes" vs "Domino" thing is kind of confusing, but refering to things as a "Lotus Notes server" all the time is a bit annoying to anyone with any experience in it, and really, those are the people you're trying to win over, so why not take 5 minutes and get the terminology right?
One of the first things that was mentioned was the formation of a new group in Microsoft specifically to address IBM/Lotus migrations. Interesting. He mentioned some of the issues around Workplace, and how some customers aren't keen to follow IBM down that path - and he's right. The session wasn't very full, and I took the chance to peek around the room, and overheard a few people talking about Workplace and how they weren't interested. There was a lot of confusion ("The next version of Notes is Java!" ... well... R8 might be, but R7 is very similar to R6 in a lot of ways, with an option becoming available later to access via the Notes plugin with the Rich Workplace client.. but whatever) being heard around the room, and Microsoft is obviously quite happy to take advantage of this wherever they can.
I made quite a few (N)notes during this presentation. Some of them were just me being pedantic at the time, I know this, and I can deal with it, but some of the stuff they were saying was just plain wrong. The more I thought about it, any mail (lets ignore applications for a moment) migration is going to be one hell of a nightmare - no matter what the source and destination systems are, and there's not a lot you can do about it. In that context, maybe it's not a big deal that your migration tools can't deal with encrypted or signed messages, and will just throw them away. I dunno?
The section on application migration was glossed over pretty quickly. They mentioned their analyzing tool, which I heard about over a year back and never got around to trying. I'll have to give it a bash soon. One of the things they also mentioned was some statistics around applications based on surveys they did of their migrating customers. Apparently 60% of Notes applications were sitting unused, 30% were being used but were classed as "simple", and then 10% were complex (think workflow here basically). Those numbers actually make sense, and I think if we were forced to think about that in most of my last jobs then they'd come out about right. It's so easy to create 20938203929032 new document libraries without thinking about it - and so thats exactly what happens. I really wouldn't want to reproduce some of the complex workflow databases I've done in Notes/Domino in ASP.NET (Exchange forms were mentioned as another option, but they didn't really sound like much of a *good* option), as quite a few of them have features which would be damned hard to reproduce. Even for the simplistic ones, there's a lot of pain there waiting to happen.
I went and had a quick talk to the presenter after his talk (which was pretty short, and he didn't invite questions, possibly my giggling in the front(ish) row put him off wanting to even ask) and raised a couple of things with him, and he really didn't seem to have much knowledge to think outside the slides. He did ask me to email him directly and he'd look into it - I think I'll do so next week when I get a free moment, if only to reiterate my current position (9 year Notes veteran, falling to the dark side etc) in case they have any use for me - I have a feeling that people like me could eventually be useful.
Tips and Tricks to running Windows with Least Privelege - Steve Riley
The title of the presentation makes the content pretty obvious - I hope. It was all about running Windows without being a local admin. I actually think I'm going to try to do this with my next rebuild. The presentation re-iterated the reasons why you'd bother, and gave some good tips and tricks as well as pros and cons (It's not a silver bullet, there are issues, and still vulnerabilities) to the whole thing, as well as some interesting links and tool names.
The short description is possibly selling the presentation a bit short. Steve is a great speaker, and always makes his presentations interesting. That said, some of this stuff kind of speaks for itself. The main points are that it's unceccesarily hard to do this in Windows at the moment, but that you can do it with a bit of patience. Of course they're planning to make it all nice and simple in Vista, so maybe you might as well just hang out for that.
Microsoft Visual C# 2.0 Changes
The actual session had a longer title than this, but it was packed out so I didn't make it in. Heaps of people standing in the sidelines and all chairs taken. I figured that it was a bit redundant finding out "changes" to a language which I've only been playing about with for a few weeks, so I took this as a prompt to wander off early..
Summary
The overall conference summary was that it was time well spent for me. I handed in my evaluation form to get a Rubix cube branded with Microsoft stuff. It seemed like a bit of a poor gift given the standard set by the backpacks, but oh well. One comment about a lot of the content - a lot of it was very high level. If you'd worked with BizTalk and went to a BizTalk presentation, you'd probably be sitting there saying "I know this". I talked to a friend and ex-colleague from years back, and that was his comment - pretty much everything that was being talked about they knew about, or were already using. Perhaps that's a lesson in picking your sessions though - if you're skilled in ASP best practices, then you won't want to go to that session - but you might get value in the overview of whats new in the next release, or in a session about something completely random for you, like firewalls or SQL, or whatever.
For me, that was the *good* thing about it. It gave me a nice high level overview of a lot of things which really helped put things into context. Some of the presentations gave me enough info to be able to say "Yep, I now know what that does" and file that into the back of my mind ("NEW FACT! NEW FACT!"), but that mileage might vary for other people. Anyhow, it was 3 days well spent for me - now all that remains is to clear the backlog of work when I get back into the office tomorrow, after being away for almost 2 weeks.. eek.