So far most of the cloud tradeshows have either been heavily developer- and investor-/analyst-oriented, or simply cloud tracks and sessions on vendor events. The Experts Conference (TEC) is different with its heavy focus on IT professionals.

Full disclosure: I have been involved helping the conference organizers set up the cloud track – and I am pretty proud of the line-up of speakers and sessions we managed to come up with.

TEC is actually a very established technology conference. They started 10 years ago as a very technical (level 400+) and practical Directory conference by the experts for the experts. I believe that with all the marketing hype about the cloud which we are getting these days, its about right time for the event to expand to the cloud. After all, IT professionals who want to be on the cutting edge today actually need to know how to set up federation, deploy Office 365, Google Apps, Amazon or Salesforce.com, what is the state of private cloud technology, what SAML, OAuth and OpenID are and how to use them, and much more.

And to give you that information we got folks from product teams, system integrators, and just practitioners with vast experience in all these technologies!

You can find the full agenda of the Cloud and Virtualization Track here. Below are just some of the highlights:

Joey Snow will be talking about Windows Azure (Microsoft’s platform as a service) from IT pro perspective – this will be quite unique considering that Microsoft’s official Azure message is very much developer-oriented!

There will be multiple sessions about Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and other components of the BPOS/Office 365 suite from Microsoft: ranging from real-world experience on when these work and when on-premise options are still superior, how to handle the migration, how to integrate your on-premise directory with the cloud system, what is their state of security and even how they stack up against Google Apps. These are getting delivered by superstars including: Jerry Camel, Mike Kostersitz, Jarrod Roark, Dave Chennault, Einar Mykletun, Bill Baer, Dmitri Gavrilov and David Smith.

There will be great discussions on the major authentication and authorization protocols including OpenID and OAuth, ADFS, REST, SAML from industry experts Brian Puhl, Eve Maler, Pat Patterson, Laura E. Hunter, Femi Aladesulu, Nikita Ryumin, Carol Wapshere,  Dave Jones,  Mark Wahl.

Finally, we have great representation from industry experts and team members from Microsoft teams (Office 365, Windows Intune, ADFS), Salesforce.com, Rackspace, Riverbed: Steve Riley, Pat Patterson, John Engates, Joseph Dadzie.

So expect a lot of highly practical content and social interaction with the folks who are using cloud in real life today!

The conference is April 17-20, 2011 in Las Vegas. Learn more and sign-up for the event here.

These are just some of the questions which are probably going to be discussed at The Experts Conference 2011 in Las Vegas, April 17-20 2011.

If these questions are relevant to you – register today and get the early bird discounts.

If you are an industry expert willing to present at the event on one of the topics I listed above or a related cloud topic - you still have a few days to submit a session proposal here. You can also contact me for more information or assistance in submitting your session proposal.

Enjoy!

You can find other session recordings from TEC (including keynote!) here.

Also, if you are based in Europe – TEC Europe in coming to Berlin in September and early bird discounts are still available – see the conference site for details.

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Also, while PDC was mainly dev-oriented – this is going to be first one oriented on IT professionals, system integrators and architects.

Here are the sessions which caught my attention:

Directory track:

This Cloud Has Roots: A Peek Into Microsoft’s Global Foundation Services AD Infrastructure by Sean Deuby (Microsoft MVP, Windows IT Pro Magazine contributor, and Enterprise Solutions Strategist with Advaiya).

Federating with the Cloud by Randy Wiemer (Architect at Oxford Computer Group – the main system integrator for Microsoft’s identity management solutions.)

GALSync and Federation in Exchange Online by Craig Martin (Director of Identity Architecture at Oxford Computer Group.)

Implementing an Identity based solution using Microsoft’s new Cloud based infrastructure by Danny Kim (CTO at FullArmor, Microsoft MVP) – Danny is telling me this will be basically a session on identity in Windows Azure based on their experience moving PolicyPortal to Azure.

Identity Integration: Multiple Directories in Cloud by Patrick Harding (CTO at Ping Identity – these guys know about identity federation in the internet probably more than anyone else!)

Exchange track:

Modern Techniques for Large Scale Exchange Environments Keynote by Konstantin Ryvkin (Konstantin is a Sr. Technology Architect in the Microsoft Business Collaboration Services Group a team which provides Exchange based hosted messaging services to Microsoft IT and other enterprise customers – really looking forward to this one!)

Exchange 2007 and its Web Services byIlse Van Criekinge (Global Knowledge)

Software + Services Integration with Microsoft Live by Richard Wakeman (Senior Consultant with Microsoft Public Sector Services.)

These are the sessions on my must-attend list. Looks like, as usual, TEC organizers managed to get a very impressive line-up of speakers and sessions. I have attended TEC (previously called DEC – Directory Experts Conference) before and based on my experience this has always been the most deep and cutting edge conference on Microsoft’s directory technologies you could find – far ahead of general purpose events like TechEd.

Registration and details can obviously be found at the conference web site.

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