The Experts Conference

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.

Uday Hegde is a Group Program Manager in the Identity and Access Team at Microsoft, where he focuses on engineering the Active Directory brand of products. He has been at Microsoft since 1999, developing a variety of products that include Active Directory, distributed file system, Windows Communication Foundation and Network Access Protection. Prior to Microsoft, Uday was at Silicon Graphics Inc.

Mark Wahl, has 19 years experience in enterprise directory, security, and identity management systems. He is co-author and editor of the LDAP protocol specifications; implementor of the first LDAP firewall; designer of the directory service products used at many major companies worldwide; architect for the Sun directory products; and is currently an architect for Microsoft security; identity and access management products. He also taught information science assurance and computer security auditing at the University of Texas at Austin, and has spoken at industry conferences in the U.S., Europe and Asia on the future of enterprise identity management.

MicrosoftFemi 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.

Rob Allen is one of the core partners at Active Identity Management, Inc., a recognized industry expert in directory and identity management technologies. He has developed several tools and directory “widgets” focused on Identity deployments centered around Microsoft’s Identity offerings.  Allen has provided Identity architecture and design for clients in the Financial, Health Care, Federal, and commercial space.  He has more than 15 years experience in the IT industry. Prior to partnering with ActiveIDM, he founded a successful Identity and Directory Services company, worked in the HealthCare industry, and worked in the software development space.

April 2011 marks James Booth’s 25th anniversary working in the IT biz. During that time he has worked for large telecommunications companies, software companies small (Zoomit) and large (Microsoft), and over the last seven years he has settled into doing Identity and Access Management consulting. He is currently working as an independent consultant on several large projects that afford him the opportunity of working with IdM software and PowerShell at the same time.

Michael Brengs is a Managing Partner with Optimal IdM, L.L.C. and has more than 18 years of experience in the software industry. Brengs has been deploying identity management solutions since joining OpenNetwork Technologies in 2000 (acquired by BMC Software), and later with Oblix (acquired by Oracle). He is a recognized identity management expert and is a frequent speaker at events and conferences. He has been a guest speaker at Oracle Open World 2006, Digital ID World 2008, the Directory Experts Conference 2008 and The Experts Conferences 2009 and 2010. He is a Microsoft Certified Professional holding the following certifications: Microsoft Certified Professional 2003, Microsoft Certified Systems Administrator 2003 and Security+.

James Cowling has more than 20 years’ experience as a consultant and architect.  Working with Microsoft Mail and Exchange led to pre-release work with MIIS. A co-founder of Oxford Computer Group, Cowling co-wrote the training courses for MIIS, ILM and FIM (several of which are now available from Microsoft). He has been involved in more than 20 implementations of this family of products, some involving more than 150,000 users. He lives in Germany with his wife, three sons and an office full of hardware that he can’t bring himself to part with.

Rebecca Croft has been a senior consultant with Ensynch for eight years and has been working with MIIS/ILM for the past four years and more recently with FIM.  She has a background in development with a focus on Microsoft technologies. She is the author of the blog www.apollojack.com. Her certifications include: MCSD and CISSP.

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.

Pamela Dingle is a Senior Technical Architect within the Office of the CTO at Ping Identity. Pamela has a long history with Identity Management, focusing on implementation, architecture and strategy over 10 years of evolution of systems such as directories, application servers, web access management systems, provisioning, and now federation. Pamela serves on the board of directors of both the Information Card Foundation and the OpenID Foundation, is active in OSIS and Kantara Initiative Interoperability efforts and runs the Pamela Project, an open source project for Information Card relying parties.

Ikrima Elhassan joined Microsoft in 2006 to work on the MIIS after working in VFX research for 4 years.  He’s helped ship MIIS 2003 SP2, ILM 2007, and FIM 2010.  He worked with internal and external partners to develop the server side & client side authentication framework as well as the out of box shipped Credential Management components.  He was also helped develop the workflow engine infrastructure as well as the out of box workflow activities.  Before leaving Microsoft to provide consulting services for Aesthetix Software, he worked on management components for Active Directory for the next version of Windows Server. He keeps an active blog to share insights and tools on Active Directory & FIM/MIIS Management at blog.aesthetixsoftware.com

Dennis Glendenning is a consultant and architect with Avanade, a global consultancy formed as a joint venture by Accenture and Microsoft. He specializes in enterprise security solutions, including directory services and identity management. Currently, he is the lead architect, responsible for perimeter access, for a private cloud service operated by one of Avanade’s Fortune 50 clients. His background includes a blend of business, project and technical management that spans 19 years, includes two advanced degrees, two technical books, and several professional certifications.

Guido Grillenmeier is a Chief Engineer within the Enterprise Services Group at Hewlett Packard. Based in Germany, he deals primarily with global Windows infrastructure deployments for large enterprise customers.  He has helped various HP customers to secure their Active Directory, make the move to 64-Bit Windows, and to utilize Hyper-V at scale even before Windows Server 2008 R2 was released. Grillenmeier has often spoken at the Directory Experts Conference (DEC), now The Experts Conference (TEC), and is also a speaker at various other Microsoft-technology related conferences, such as Microsoft Tech-ED, IT Forum or Windows Connections. He has led the development and delivery for HP’s Windows Server 2008 Academies to HP’s own Services division and has been a Microsoft MVP for Directory Services for the past six years. Besides writing articles for technical magazines, Grillenmeier is also the co-author of Microsoft Windows Security Fundamentals (Digital Press).

Laura E. Hunter is a Principal Technology Architect for Microsoft IT’s Identity & Access Management team, responsible for determining architecture and strategy for Microsoft deployments of products and services across the IAM suite. In previous lives she has been an Identity Management consultant, the Active Directory architect for a global engineering firm, IT Project Leader for the University of Pennsylvania, and Director of Computer Services for a regional headquarters of the Salvation Army. Hunter has a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of the Active Directory Cookbook, 2nd & 3rd Editions, from O’Reilly Publishing, is an unrepentant ADFS technology zealot, and likes to talk about herself in the third person when providing auto-biographical information. She blogs at www.shutuplaura.com, and Twitters (tweets? She’s not cool enough to know the verb form of Twitter) @adfskitteh.

Dave Jones has worked in the field formally known as Directory Services for the past 19 years, charting a course through Banyan Vines, Novell NDS, Netscape Directory Server and Active Directory. He is now the Identity Services architect at Cisco and is responsible for all the Identity Management infrastructure architecture to programmatically maintain the lifecycle of digital identities representing people and computers. Prior to Cisco, Jones was the Principal for a network management company he founded, Bisant Networks (bisant.net) and has consulted to a large number of Fortune 500 companies with assets in Northern California and Miami.

Andreas Kjellman is the program manager for FIM Synchronization Services, earlier known as MIIS.  He has been working with this product line since the days of MMS, first as a Principal Consultant for Microsoft Consulting Services and currently as a PM in Redmond.  During the development of FIM he also owned a few other areas, e.g. work flow and setup, but ended up where he started with synchronization as his focus.

Komar is the president of Komar Consulting Inc. in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Komar has worked in partnership with Microsoft over the past three years as a subject matter expert on network security and Windows 2000 Active Directory design. Over the past year, Komar has spent the majority of his time researching the deployment of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and the various technologies that depend on a PKI to provide authentication and encryption services. Between writing assignments, Komar speaks at industry conferences around the world, such as WinConnections, MCP TechMentor, Microsoft Tech Ed, and the Microsoft Enterprise Conference (MEC). He is known for delivering the “under the hood” sessions that look at the details of technology and reveal how systems really work in a network.

Mike Kostersitz is a 17+ year veteran in Microsoft. He started at Microsoft Austria in 1994 and worked in MCS Austria on architecting and deploying hosting solutions until 2002. He moved to Redmond with his family to work at Microsoft Headquarters on products like Exchange, HMC and Microsoft Online until 2008 when he returned to Austria. Currently he is working as a Principal Architect in the BPOS Center Of Excellence team in Microsoft Services EMEA.

David Lundell, author of FIM Best Practices Volume 1 and blog.ilmbestpractices.com, has been an MIIS/ILM/FIM MVP and TEC/DEC speaker since 2007. 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. As the Identity Management Practice Director for Ensynch he has designed and supervised numerous Identity Management projects involving FIM 2010, and others, has also served as the SQL expert on several SharePoint implementations..

Darren Mar-Elia is CTO & Founder of SDM Software, Inc., a Windows Group Policy management solutions company. Prior to starting SDM Software, Darren was Sr. Director of Product Engineering for DesktopStandard– a Group Policy tools company that was acquired by Microsoft. Darren was also Quest Software’s CTO for Windows Management and is a Microsoft MVP for Group Policy. Darren has more than 25 years of IT experience in systems and network administration design and architecture. He maintains the popular Group Policy resource web site at www.gpoguy.com and has been a contributing editor for Windows IT Pro Magazine since 1997. He has written and contributed to twelve different books on Windows including, most recently, the “Windows Server 2008 Security Resource Kit Guide”, the “Windows Group Policy Guide”, published by Microsoft Press in 2005 and “The Definitive Guide to Windows 2000 Administration,” “The Definitive Guide to Windows 2000 Group Policy” and “The Tips & Tricks Guide to Group Policy,” all published online by Realtimepublishers.com. Darren also speaks frequently at conferences on Windows infrastructure topics.

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.

Tomasz Onyszko is well-recognized expert in areas of directory services/identity and access management. He has gathered his vast experience during more than 11 years of working in the IT industry designing, building and maintaining systems in complex environments. He spent the past six years on Id&AM projects in Microsoft Consulting Services and now is working on building Connected Dots Id&AM practice. Onyszko has delivered technical sessions at major events such as TechED Europe, The Experts Conference and Microsoft Technology Summit. In the past, he was awarded twice with the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award in Directory Services area (which he is hoping to get back … one day).

Jeremy Palenchar is a Director at Avanade, Inc. where he focuses on Directory Services and Identity Management. Palenchar is responsible for the planning, design, and implementation of Directory Service and Identity Management solutions for Avanade’s Fortune 500 clients. He is a Microsoft Certified Architect in Directory Services and holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Engineering from North Carolina State University. He lives and works in sunny, downtown Seattle.

Jorge de Almeida Pinto is a Senior Consultant within Oxford Computer Group and is based in The Netherlands. He has been active in ICT since 1997. He has worked with Windows infrastructures since 1997, and he specializes in Windows Server, Active Directory and ILM/FIM. Besides that de Almeida Pinto has a very large interest in other Microsoft Identity and Access Management technologies like Certificate Services (CS) and Unified Access Gateway (UAG). He is MCSE certified and enjoys writing articles in a Dutch technical magazine (NetOpus). He is also a frequent contributor and active member of several forums/mailinglists/newsgroups on the internet. His blog can be found at: http://blogs.dirteam.com/blogs/jorge/default.aspx.

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.

Nikita Ryumin joined Quest two years ago and works as a program manager for backup and recovery solutions, focusing on technology research for cloud computing. He is a graduate of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and currently resides in Moscow.

Nick Sabinske has 13 years of professional experience with server infrastructure in the educational and manufacturing industries. As a Senior Systems Administrator on Teleflex’s server operations engineering team, he has been instrumental in the design and deployment of global directory and identity systems for the company and plotting the course for future improvements. Sabinske  was the primary systems architect for the Radiant Virtual Directory system implemented at Teleflex which has allowed the company to transition from Sun One LDAP to Microsoft Active Directory as the primary record of identity for employees.

Ulf B.Simon-Weidner is a senior consultant with a European provider for infrastructure solutions in Germany. He also is an independent author, consultant, speaker and trainer. He has been repeatedly awarded MVP for Windows Server – Directory Services. Throughout his professional career, Simon-Weidner has had many consulting engagements with major European corporations, mostly in the financial sector. His certifications include Microsoft Certified Trainer and Microsoft Certified System Engineer (Security) for all Operating Systems since NT4.

Matt Steele is a Program Manager on the Azure Access Control Service (ACS) team at Microsoft.  He’s been working on software development for identity and access over the past 10 years, recently focusing on federation technologies on premises and in the cloud.

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.

Vinny Voci has 10 years of professional experience with server infrastructure in the retail and manufacturing industries. Prior to entering his professional career he obtained a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Appalachian State University and a Masters in Computer Science from North Carolina State University. Voci currently manages the server operations engineering team which is responsible for the design and implementation of the datacenter systems and infrastructure at Teleflex.

Carol Wapshere is proud to be, for three years now, part of that select group of geeky obsessives – the ILM MVPs. She is also the writer of the well known missmiis blog, once described by the lovely Jackson Shaw as “the Dear Abby of the MIIS world.” She’s been in IT far too long to talk about now, but looking back, the signs of future identity interests were there early on, when she created a simple user registration and provisioning system out of an Access database, batch files and shell scripts. Wapshere is currently working as an IT consultant and identity architect in Geneva, Switzerland.

Dean Wells has been working in the information technology industry since 1987. His roles and experience have been varied and include software development, training, systems security consulting and enterprise-systems design & implementation. Wells has been training and presenting for about 15 years and has hosted hundreds of technical training courses for end-users and Microsoft technical staff alike. He is also a commonplace speaker at popular industry events such as NetWorld Interop, TechEd and the Directory Experts Conferences. He has been working with Active Directory since its inception, and earlier in various beta releases, since 1999. A few years later, Wells was awarded Microsoft’s MVP designation in Directory Services and Security. Most recently, he joined the Directory Services product group at Microsoft where he now works as a Senior Program Manager.

Joe Zamora is a senior consultant in the Identity Management practice at Ensynch.  Joe has over 10 years experience in development, is the author of the CShark blog: http://c–shark.blogspot.com/, and has published several projects on Codeplex for the FIM 2010 community.