Phil Wicklund (MCTS) has years of experience architecting and administering corporate SharePoint environments. He taught Mindsharp’s 2003 and 2007 SharePoint developer course from 2004 to 2007. Today as a SharePoint consultant at RBA Consulting, he shares real-world insights and in-depth best practices with clients of all varieties. Prior to joining Mindsharp, Phil was the SharePoint Architect and Technical Lead at RSM McGladrey, a Fortune 500 accounting and business consulting firm. Phil provided leadership over McGladrey’s SharePoint environment including all application development, SharePoint administration, and server administration. Phil was also a key player in introducing SharePoint into the firm. He maintains an active SharePoint Blog at http://philwicklund.com.

Paul J. Swider is a freelance consultant and the Enterprise SharePoint Strategist for OnClick Solutions. In addition, he is president of the Charleston SharePoint Users Group and an accomplished entrepreneur. Swider’s 17 years of software consulting experience combined with many Microsoft certifications and speaking credentials have made him an authority in the SharePoint Community. Swider also writes and teaches about enterprise collaboration concepts with demonstrated knowledge you can only get in “the trenches”. His specialties include enterprise SharePoint deployment, information architecture, SharePoint development best practices and social media integration.

A graduate of Yale University and Thunderbird, Dan has spent 15 years as a consultant and trainer, delivering solutions to tens of thousands of IT professionals from the most prestigious organizations and corporations around the world. Dan’s company, Intelliem, is a boutique consulting and training firm with a Fortune-caliber clientele and deep expertise and experience in Windows, Active Directory, and SharePoint. From his base in beautiful Maui, Dan travels around the globe supporting customers and delivering Microsoft technologies training. Dan is also a contributing editor for Windows IT Pro magazine, a Microsoft MVP (Windows Server Directory Services, 2007, and Office SharePoint Server, 2008-2009), and the community lead of OfficeSharePointPro.com. Last year, Dan published two books with Microsoft: the Windows Administration Resource Kit and the training kit for the 70-640 MCTS exam, both of which are at the top of the bestseller list of Windows books. He is currently building SharePoint solutions to support the broadcast of the 2010 winter Olympics in Vancouver as the Microsoft Technologies Consultant for NBC Olympics, a role he played last year in Beijing and previously in Torino.

Jeff Holliday is the Solutions Architect for Ensynch and their SharePoint Consulting Practice. He oversees the technical solution designs for all SharePoint projects and managed Ensynch’s participation in the SharePoint 2010 Partner Technical Preview Program. He currently focuses on architecture design, branding customization, business process automation and web part development. Holliday has designed, built and deployed everything from single server, single site SharePoint installations to multi-continent/multi-farm global infrastructures.

Within the Exchange Server Product Group, Ross Smith is a member of the Customer Experience team and has the following focus areas:

• Help resolve and preempt critical customer escalations
• Assist in defining improvements to, implementing, and running Exchange’s next-generation Sustained Engineering Experience process
• Collaborate to produce documentation and provide customer, Microsoft Services, and Product Group coordination and education

He joined Microsoft in 2001 as a Messaging Systems Engineer working for Microsoft IT focusing on Exchange Server 2000 and SharePoint designs. After a stint in Microsoft IT, he moved to Premier as an Alliance Support Consultant supporting and designing a variety of customers’ Exchange and Active Directory implementations. Prior to joining the product group, Smith was a Senior Messaging Technology Architect in the Exchange Center of Excellence (ECoE). The ECoE’s goal was to provide high impact, value, and volume expertise to Microsoft customers, Microsoft field personnel, and the product groups. While within the ECoE, he developed intellectual property (IP) used to develop solutions like the Exchange Risk Assessment, Desired Configuration Monitoring, and Service Level Management offerings. His deep focus on all aspects of Exchange including storage, high availability, security, client access, and transport has led to IP being developed and leveraged as best practices in customer presentations, whitepapers, blog postings, Exchange Masters training, and field readiness areas. Over the last few years, he has published quite a bit of content, including the Exchange 2007 Mailbox Storage Requirements Calculator and the Continuous Replication Deep Dive Whitepaper. Smith regularly presents at industry conferences on Exchange and is also a trainer for the Microsoft Certified Master | Exchange Server program.

Brett Shirley started as a programmer (aka Software Engineer / SDE) in 1999 on Microsoft’s AD Replication team. He moved to the ESE (Extensible Storage Engine) team in summer 2004.

Scott Schnoll (MCT, MCSE, MCSA) is a Principal Technical Writer on the Exchange User Education team at Microsoft where he authors content on a variety of topics related to Exchange Server, including clustering, high-availability, storage and performance. He is a frequent speaker at major global industry conferences, such as Microsoft TechEd, Microsoft IT Forum, Comdex and MCP TechMentor. Prior to joining Microsoft, Scott authored Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Distilled (Addison-Wesley, 2004) and he was the lead author of Exchange 2000 Server: The Complete Reference (Osborne McGraw-Hill, 2000). Scott is a former long-time Microsoft MVP for Exchange Server, Windows and Rights Management Services.

Juergen Hasslauer is a senior consultant with infoWAN Datenkommunikation GmbH in Germany. He supports companies to define the architecture of their IT solutions. His current focus is designing high available Microsoft Exchange environments and infrastructure optimization using virtualization solutions. He is a frequent speaker at industry conferences such as Microsoft Exchange Connections and a coauthor of the book, Designing Storage for Exchange 2007 SP1. Prior to joining infoWAN, Juergen worked 9 years as a technology consultant with HP.

David Espinoza is a Program Manager for the Exchange Technology Adoption Program (TAP). The goal of the TAP program is to work closely with a set of customers to help test, deploy, and provide the product team feedback on Exchange Server throughout the product development cycle.

Outside of the TAP program Dave reviews Books on Exchange for authors; Dave also works closely with the Exchange Ranger program and the Exchange Center of Excellence.

Prior to working in the Exchange Product group Dave was a Group Manager of Messaging Engineering for the Messaging & Collaboration Services Group. He was responsible for delivery of technology platforms, testing of vendor solutions, and documentation for new designs and architecture for corporate e-mail systems. The engineering team makes recommendations to development groups for improving existing products and design configurations.

David has been with Microsoft for 15 years and has a wealth of IT experience. He started as Service Manager for Telecom operations, and later managed a variety of operation teams including Exchange Server operations, Network operations, Server operations, Telecom operations and Data Center operations.

Prior to joining Microsoft, David worked for AT&T for 15 years where he managed many groups from Main Frame operations to Central Office teams and Service Management.

David has a Bachelor of Science Degree in Computer Science with an emphasis in Information systems. .

David Sengupta has been a Microsoft Exchange Server MVP since 1998, and has worked with Exchange since its inception. He is director of unified communications at Quest Software. A leading expert in messaging and unified communications, David has written for many print and online publications, contributes regularly to books on messaging and Exchange, and speaks at major Microsoft events and conferences, including TechEd and IT Forum.

Now in is his fourth year as an ILM MVP, Brad Turner is a project-oriented veteran of the Information Technology industry. He has taken a lead technical role in successful projects for large government and education entities, as well as mid-sized and enterprise corporations. His areas of expertise include enterprise, directory, and identity management architecture, systems integration, as well as domain and systems management. Brad’s solutions have won several worldwide partner awards.

Reede Taylor is the Manager of the Identity Management Team with KPMG’s Information Technology Services group (ITS Global) located in the Netherlands. He has 13 years of experience in enterprise solution architecture, system integration, deployment, and management of Identity & Access Management services. Prior to KPMG, Reede was a systems engineer for a document imaging consulting company based in Northern Virginia.

Joel Silver is a System Engineer on the Microsoft IT Identity Management Team where he is responsible for the Microsoft IT implementation and architecture of Forefront Identity Manager. The Microsoft IT Forefront Identity Manager implementation is the primary tool that will be used to manage groups and all AD objects in the future. Joel is also responsible for the FIM system used to sync Active Directory objects and attributes within all internal forests at Microsoft. Joel has been involved in multiple identity management projects that deal with FIM, metrics, Sarbanes-Oxley, and other IT solutions. Joel has extensive experience with IT applications at Microsoft. Prior to joining Microsoft Joel was a test lead for a Seattle company that specialized in connecting IT systems.

Brandon Shell has been in the IT industry since 1994. He spent his early years as a PC technician and general fix-it guy for numerous companies. In 1999, he started a consulting company focused on building, designing and supporting networks built around a Microsoft Windows infrastructure. He also offered training on the solutions and products he provided. In 2000, he joined Microsoft as contractor for the Directory Services team and later joined Microsoft in 2002 as a full time rapid response engineer focusing on Directory Service support for the larger customers in the North East. In 2004, Shell left Microsoft and took a position that allowed him to build on his Active Directory experience and incorporate new technologies, such as Citrix’s XenApp and XenDesktop products. Today, Shell maintains his love of all things Active Directory but has adjusted his focus on another newer passion, PowerShell. In 2007, he joined the PowerShell-MVP ranks and has spent the last several years building his PowerShell skillset and assisting/persuading others in building theirs.

Brian Puhl is an Architect on the Microsoft IT Identity and Access Management team. He started with Microsoft in 2001, as an Active Directory engineer, and has recently been delivering solutions around MSIT’s adoption of cloud services.

Craig Martin speaks in the third person when writing his own brief biography. He has been sync’ing for longer than he ever thought possible. He has also done work integrating ILM and CLM, spending countless hours weeding out issues in his lab environments learning CLM lessons the hard way in order to beat his chest in triumph and share his scars as lessons in a self-deprecating manner.

David Lundell, ILM MVP (3 years running), is in his 4th year speaking at TEC, has delivered multiple preconference workshops, including “Identity All Up” which covered ILM 2, CLM, AD RMS, and AD FS. He has trained people from hundreds of organizations worldwide on how to implement FIM/ILM 2, ILM 2007 and SQL Server. Lundell has an MBA and a BS in Computer Engineering from the University of Arizona, where he was also a National Merit Scholar. His certifications include: MCSE, MCITP: Database Administrator, MCITP: Database Developer, MCITP: Business Intelligence Developer, MCSD and is also an author. As the Identity Management Practice Director for Ensynch he has designed and led several recent Identity Mangement projects including a full blown production implementation of FIM 2010, and is developing add-on reporting capabilities for FIM, and has also served as the SQL expert on several SharePoint implementations.

Laura E. Hunter is an Identity Architect with the Oxford Computer Group, currently based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. A 15-year veteran of the IT Wars, Hunter specializes in Active Directory, AD FS and Identity and Access Management design, implementation and deployment projects. Hunter is a Microsoft Certified Master in Windows Server 2008 Active Directory, and holds a Master’s Degree in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania.

Guido Grillenmeier is a Master Technologist within the Advanced Technology Group at Hewlett Packard. Based in Germany, he deals primarily with global Windows infrastructure deployments for large enterprise customers. His current focus is helping HP customers to make a smooth transition to 64-bit Windows and Windows Server 2008. Guido has often spoken at NetPro’s Directory Experts Conference (DEC) and has been a speaker at various other Microsoft-technology related conferences, such as Microsoft Tech-ED, IT Forum or Windows Connections. In the last few months he has been leading the development and delivery for HP’s Windows Server 2008 Academies to HP’s own Services division. He has been a Microsoft MVP for Directory Services since 2004 and is the co-author of “Microsoft Windows Security Fundamentals” (Digital Press).

Dmitri Gavrilov is a development lead in Exchange, responsible for mailbox migration. Previously, he worked as a developer in Active Directory group. He was responsible for various code components of AD, including Active Directory Application Mode (ADAM), currently known as “AD LDS”. He was the lead for AD UI in Windows Server 2008 release. He joined Microsoft in 2000. Some exciting projects that he has participated in are AD on SQL prototype and ADAM. Prior to joining Microsoft, he worked as a software developer at Axia Multimedia Corp, Calgary, Canada. He also worked as a Computational Scientist at MACI (Multimedia Advanced Computing Infrastructure), an HPC lab at the University of Calgary, Canada. Gavrilov holds a M.Sc. in Computer Science from Moscow State University, Russia, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Calgary, Canada. In his spare time, he enjoys sailing and spending time with his wife and two sons..

Brian Desmond is senior consultant with Moran Technologies. He has been a Microsoft MVP for Directory Services since 2003 and is the author of Active Directory, 4th Edition from O’Reilly. Desmond is an Active Directory (and sometimes Exchange) focused consultant leading and delivering on projects primarily for large enterprise (40K – 500K seat) customers. His website can be found at: www.briandesmond.com.

Chris Calderon, Senior Consultant at Ensynch Inc., specializes in the delivery of Microsoft-based technologies and enterprise solutions around Identity and Access Management and Directory Services. Chris has extensive experience in designing and implementing technologies involving Identity Lifecycle Manager (ILM), Active Directory Federation Services, and infrastructure security around the Windows platform.

Femi Aladesulu is a Senior Systems Engineer on the Microsoft IT Identity and Access Management team. He is the lead engineer for the MSIT deployment of Active Directory Federation Services.

Gil Kirkpatrick is a well-known expert in the design and development of large-scale distributed software for enterprise networks. He is Microsoft Most Valuable Professional and has more than 27 years of software development expertise. He is a recognized authority and renowned speaker on commercial network directories, including Banyan StreetTalk, Novell eDirectory, and Microsoft Active Directory. In his previous position as Director of Engineering, Kirkpatrick was responsible for the development of directory management products for NetPro and served as the architect and lead engineer for its flagship product, DirectoryAnalyzer. Kirkpatrick joined NetPro in 1994 when the company acquired his previous employer, High Technology Systems. He is the author of Active Directory Programming, published by MacMillan USA.

SharePoint has “won the gold” as a platform for rich collaboration and rapidly deployed solutions during the broadcast of the Olympics from Torino, Beijing and for the upcoming Vancouver 2010. Join Dan Holme, Microsoft Technologies Consultant for NBC Olympics, for an inside look at how SharePoint is put to use in one of the most unique IT efforts in the world. Discover ways that you might leverage SharePoint in your enterprise, and how the Olympics broadcast can inform the choices you make supporting and developing for SharePoint. This unique session sheds an exciting and practical light on the business value and ROI of SharePoint. Ever wonder how you can make the most of SharePoint (Services or Server) in your organization? This session might help you figure it out!

SharePoint’s security model can be confusing, with its deep hierarchy of securable objects, granular permissions and policies, and clunky user and group management interfaces. This session will demystify SharePoint security by dissecting each of these components and presenting best practices for implementing and managing security. You’ll learn when and why it makes sense to leverage Active Directory groups or use SharePoint groups, and you’ll take away options for new permission levels and settings that address common business requirements.

Visual Studio workflows and InfoPath Forms Services are a powerful team for your company’s business processes. Three examples of how you can leverage InfoPath within your custom Visual Studio workflows will be demonstrated. 1: how to deploy a workflow enabled form into a form library programmatically. 2: how to programmatically retrieve form data entered by a user. 3: how to leverage an InfoPath form to collect custom workflow initiation data and task edit data.

Too often, business intelligence (BI) is seen as a giant, expensive undertaking, but it doesn’t have to be! Learn about high-value solutions through “BI Lite”—solutions that use out-of-the-box functionality of Windows SharePoint Server lists and Office client applications to move critical business data from old-school Excel and Access files to online, multi-user solutions. In this session, you will learn several approaches that you can use to make the most of SharePoint as a database and application platform without ever cracking open Visual Studio, and before connecting Business Connectivity Services. Through practical, real world examples you’ll be inspired to identify and solve business problems and to deliver “big wins” that drive success and adoption of SharePoint and Office in your enterprise. You’ll learn to:

• move important, shared, or multi-user databases from their 20th century home in Excel worksheets and Access databases to SharePoint
• create rich, code-free “business intelligence lite” SharePoint solutions that leverage Excel as an analysis and presentation tool
• develop sophisticated, intelligent relational database applications with gorgeous forms and reports using Access as a SharePoint front-end
• leverage the new and improved Excel Services and Access Services for high-value, low-effort solutions.

Simple, static pages are a thing of the past – today’s standard is becoming rich in usability and graphical charm. Come learn how to leverage JQuery and/or Silverlight so you can really “light up” your SharePoint sites!

In this session we will review the top 15 things every developer should know when migrating to SharePoint 2010. Take a deep dive into the changes made to the object model, SharePoint Services, Business Connectivity Services and user interface enhancements.

Exchange Server 2010 carries on the tradition begun in Exchange Server 2007 of dramatically reducing mailbox storage costs. Come and learn how we’ve enabled new levels of storage flexibility in Exchange Server 2010, and find out the technical details that will help you select the right storage for your Exchange Server 2010 environment.

Are you or your customers interested in multi-datacenter site resilience but aren’t clear about how Exchange 2010 provides it? Are you interested in understanding everything that has to be done and that happens when you activate a standby site and failback? This is your opportunity to get the deep dive on site resilience deployments and activation.

Welcome to the future! The future of Exchange high availability, that is. In this session, we reveal the changes and improvements to the built-in high availability platform in Exchange Server 2010. Exchange 2010 includes a unified framework for high availability and disaster recovery that is quick to deploy and easy to manage. Learn about all of the new features in Exchange 2010 that make it the most resilient, highly available version of Exchange ever.

This talk will concentrate on the Mailbox Replication Service (MRS), a new agent in E2010, responsible for performing mailbox moves asynchronously and reliably. It will examine such topics as online mailbox moves, automatic error recovery, distributed throttling, and controlling MRS with *-MoveRequest cmdlets. We will also discuss cross-org migrations, both Remote through MRSProxy webservice and RemoteLegacy through LDAP and MAPI. We will talk about cross-org move prerequisites and how to avoid deploying GalSync.

You finished the design concept of your new Exchange Server environment. Are you confident that it will fulfill the requirements of your users? Are you sure that the latency of the storage subsystem is within the supportability boundaries defined by Microsoft? How can you verify if your Client Access Server is able to handle the predicted number of concurrent connections from your mobile workforce using Outlook Web Access and Outlook Anywhere? We will discuss how you can use Jetstress to test your storage subsystem. You will learn how to use LoadGen to simulate users accessing the Exchange environment with different protocols. This will enable you to validate your design and be confident that you identify issues before you move the Exchange environment to production.

Microsoft deemphasized the streaming backup API with Exchange Server 2007. With Exchange Server 2010 you have to use Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) because the streaming API is deprecated. In this session we will explain the architecture of VSS and provide an overview how the VSS components interact during a backup / restore of an Exchange database. You will learn what you have to consider during your storage design. Should I use a hardware provider or a software provider solution? What tools are available to troubleshoot VSS? These are the questions we will discuss in the session. This will help you to better plan your backup infrastructure and understand what happens in the background during a backup / restore of an Exchange database.

This session describes the overall architecture of Exchange Server 2010 and key considerations for the scalability and performance of each server role. This session provides the background and framework for the other Exchange 2010 sessions, serving as a bridge between the overview session and drill-downs in each product area. This session is a recommended pre-requisite for the Exchange 2010 deployment and migration session.

If you want to take advantage of a clustered mailbox server then you have to understand the architecture of a Windows Failover Cluster. This session explains the features in Windows Server 2008 related to clustering. You will learn what you have to consider if you want to use a geographical dispersed mailbox server deployment. Where should I host the File Share Witness? How should I configure the DNS entries? We will share configuration and management best practices. This session is focused on the Windows operating system of an Exchange cluster. It will help you to understand the foundation of your clustered mailbox server.

This presentation will demonstrate how ILM Architects, Engineers, and Administrators can leverage Active Directory Distributed File System (DFS) to replicate solution content between the primary ILM server and the warm-standby server as well as Group Policy Preferences to deploy scheduled tasks. Solution content is typically any of the following file information used in an ILM solution: MAData, Run Profile automation scripts, and dependent code libraries. Setup and configuration of DFS & GPO Preferences for a Windows 2008 AD environment will be covered in a live demo.

Within many enterprises, keeping an architecture simple and straight forward is an objective many have tried to obtain. While some have achieved that goal, that accomplishment can fade once operational processes, procedures and security requirements are coupled into the architecture. Thus, sometimes making straight forward technical solutions challenging and time consuming to maintain.

A Certificate Services (CS) infrastructure has the trifecta as it requires 1) strict adherence to an architecture standard, 2) detailed processes and procedures, and 3) adherence to security requirements and principals in order to maintain a defined assurance and support levels. This session will focus on elements that are required to have a Certificate Services Infrastructure to support defined Low, Medium & High Assurance level requirements and the management realities of implementing and maintaining an enterprise wide certificate services infrastructure.

Here is the story of how a large custom group application was migrated to FIM 2010. It is a great story that describes not only the technical details of how the migration was completed but also how the business with so many groups was able to make the smooth transition from a very entrenched system to a new system. How did we do this? How could we set so many groups for migration while they are being used? How could we train the user base to use a new tool? What were the problems? What can you learn from this? Come find out.

Learn how to tune FIM 2010 to make it scream. Take a look at the various architectures and what they buy you. Learn how crucial SQL is to FIM performance and what to do about it. You’ll also learn tips for workflows and the FIM web service and receive a crash course in the SQL Server Optimization.

In the world of on premise and hosted “cloud based” solutions, how can you best simplify your coexistence strategy? Attend this session presented by Ensynch’s Identity Management and SharePoint teams to see how the combined knowledge of each practice helped shape one of the most robust methods for you to enable Single Sign On for your on premise and cloud based apps.

In a FIM deployment of any size, administrators will want to automate the management and maintenance of their servers and configuration as much as possible. Come to this interactive and demo-filled session to see real-world examples of Powershell automation and scripts that you can use to improve your FIM maintenance experience. Whether you are new to the Powershell “game” or a seasoned pro, you will find tips, tricks, and advice that you can start using right away within your environment.

This session will desribe the benefits and the risks of virtualizing AD on Hyper-V from an enterprise deployment of Hyper-V. There are various aspects of virtualization and how it may impact the operation of your AD infrastructure, that are critical to understand before making the decision either for or against virtualizing your AD domain controllers. This session will share the expericence gained from a large scale, global Hyper-V deployment, centrally managed through SCVMM, which included the partial virtualization of AD.

Mission critical services are moving the cloud, and the dependency on your federation infrastructure is only going to become more critical.  Come listen to stories from the trenches, as MSIT engineers talk about their experience deploying and running Active Directory Federation Services 2.0, and drill down into some of the common (and uncommon) issues, and find out how to troubleshoot this new service.

Windows Server 2008 was the first OS that allowed us to safely deploy RODCs in the DMZ – this approach can helps you to reduce the costs of managing multiple AD forests in the DMZ and simplify overall management of the DMZ. It was and is a key reason for HP to leverage RODCs quite to the surprise of Microsoft at the time. In the meantime this solution has been embraced by Microsoft and further work has been done in R2 to improve the manageability of this solution. This session will recap where RODCs in the DMZ are a good fit in your enterprise and how the solution has become even more attractive with Windows Server 2008 R2.

What does an Identity Management team do as they watch applications and resources lift off into the sky?  Come find out how the Microsoft IT IDM team has been leading through the adoption of Online Services (such as Exchange), integration with Live ID applications, and the mass migration of internal LOB applications to Windows Azure…while trying to maintain their sanity and security.

This session examines what makes sense in AD and what doesn’t, shows how to evaluate a proposed schema change and even helps you deal with a fear of schema changes. You’ll learn how to look for attributes that need indexing, how to secure data (such as a confidential flag), and finally, carrying out a schema change (such as LDIF files vs something else).

In this session we will discuss how to use Windows 2008/2008 R2 to deploy Read only Domain controllers using Powershell. This session will focus on remote office deployments but will be applicable to central offices as well.

Whether you’re trying out AD FS for the first time in a test lab, or if you’ve deployed a full-scale production environment, sooner than later you’re going to run into something that’s not working the way it should. Come hear a collection of tips and tricks for troubleshooting Microsoft’s federation technology and its underlying components gleaned from untold hours of suffering mightily under the Iron Fist of PKI, and other common AD FS maladies.

This talk by one of ADAM’s creators will touch on rarely discussed areas of ADAM personality, such as user proxies, bindable objects, the minimalistic schema, password policies, and the life without GCs. The talk will examine the principles and aspirations used in the design of this product. If time permits, we’ll also discuss AdamSync.