We’ve opened up the TEC website for registration for the Berlin conference (September 14-16). Check out http://www.tec2009.com.

The agenda is pretty well nailed down, with the exception of a couple of sessions. Most of the sessions for Berlin were taken from the top rated sessions at TEC in Las Vegas, but I hope to fill in the remaining slots with some German or other European-based speakers. We should have that figured out in the next couple of days.

Holger and Jorg from Microsoft Consulting Services are doing their ILM “2” (now Forefront Identity Manager) workshop from TEC in Las Vegas as well. It’s good to have them back.

And the TEC/Quest intro video is up on YouTube (finally!), along with the other multimedia goofiness from TEC in Las Vegas. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yu-05a8rug.

I’ve been working on a series of podcasts devoted to Active Directory Disaster Recovery (one of my favorite topics). The format is a little like a talk radio show: I act as the moderator, and I have one or two guest experts in the(virtual) studio to discuss various issues around AD DR. I did the first podcast before TEC in Las Vegas, which focused on AD DR planning. Bill Foster, an Active Directory architect at a large US corporation, and Shawn Barker, PM for AD recovery products at Quest were the guests. Bill’s environment is quite large, and he had some great insights into the entire process of DR planning, from risk assessment through recovery planning and testing. I’ve seen his AD DR plan, and I can tell you, it is a righteous piece of work. Shawn brought a lot of perspective from the product team as well as experience with a wide range of customers. The AD DR planning podcast is available on The Experts Community website at http://theexpertscommunity.com/item/show/podcast/266.

The other podcasts that I’ve planned for AD DR include:

• Group Policy Disaster Recovery
• Backing up Active Directory
• Recovering Active Directory data
• Recovering the Active Directory service (including domain and forest recovery)

I’m recording the Group Policy disaster recovery segment tomorrow. Darren Mar-Elia of GPO Guy and SDM Software fame and Chris Ashley, the PM for Quest’s GP products, will be my guests. We’ll discuss how GP works, what some of the risks GP failures pose to your environment, how you can mitigate those risks, and finally, different strategies for backing up and recovering group policies. As with all the content on The Experts Community website, the podcasts aren’t product pitches or marketing fluff; they are real-world insights from real-world experts. I hope you take the time to download the podcasts and listen to them and I’d love to hear any of your feedback, including suggestions for other podcast topics.

The annual Microsoft MVP Summit starts tomorrow evening in Seattle. I’m flying up around noon, and I hope to meet up with some fellow AD/ILM/Exchange MVPs tomorrow night for dinner and beers. Mon-Wed will be filled with MSFT product team presentations about what’s coming, and some corporate cheerleading from the MSFT executive suite.

Mark Arnold (you AD guys may know Mark as Mr. Laura Hunter) will be attending TEC09 in Las Vegas next month. Mark is a long-time Exchange MVP, and has been extremely helpful in rounding up speakers and support for the first TEC/Exchange event. I’m glad he’s able to attend.

I’ve been getting lots of last minute changes from speakers for TEC this year, many more than I recall from prior conferences. For instance, we just yesterday finalized the four sessions from the Active Directory product team.

• Nathan Muggli will handle the keynote duties for the AD team (we’re experimenting with a new combined keynote format where members from each of the product teams will spend 20 minutes or so discussing their product area roadmaps).

• Dennis Angeline is a lead PM on the AD team, and he will be covering “What’s New in Active Directory for Windows Server 2008 R2”.

• James Dean (James McColl and Dean Wells) will discuss the new AD PowerShell provider that is part of 2008 R2.

• TEC newbie Ivan Lam will demo and discuss the new Active Directory Administration Center.

So it looks like a pretty good lineup from the product team this year. And note: there are NO RODC sessions from the product team this year!

Find out more at http://www.tec2009.com

The NetPro tradition of office pranks is alive and well inside of Quest.

I got a notice last week that I had received the nod from the MVP gods at Microsoft. That's always a nice way to start the year.

I like the MVP Summit, and the free MSDN subscription is invaluable IMHO. The voucher for the company store is always nice too, but I have yet to actually use it. Maybe this time I'll remember to use the voucher before it expires.