TEC 2012 Summary

Wow TEC 2012 is already over and I am already back home. What a week!

The venue was great. San Diego is always a great place to be, cool yet not too cold. Right on the bay. Great hotel. The Marriot Marquis and Marinas has an awesome pool – went for a great swim on Monday night. Tuesday morning I really enjoyed a jog on the Boardwalk. I ran up to the USS Midway. Tons of other attractions right nearby.

The sessions were very good. Unfortunately, I couldn’t attend all of the sessions I wanted to attend. I had a few conference calls and sometimes they were at the same time.

The keynote by Uday Hegde was quite good – he covered how Windows 8 (Windows Server 2012) will extend the File Classification Infrastructure type technology to permissions. We will be able to do claims based permissions on files! Pretty cool. Deployment of AD will become simpler – less running around to different machines to run prep this and prep that.

I skipped Adam and Ken’s session on Reporting with FIM R2. I am sure it was excellent and very similar to what they showed us at MVP summit (that and a con call meant I wasn’t there). I also had to pass on Jeremy’s session on SCIM, which was also at the same hour as Laura Hunter’s session on Protection at MSFT.

In the afternoon I conducted the showdown between Classic and Declarative and had a great time, but was wishing I could have split in two and attended Brian Desmond’s session on Office 365 prep to see if he has come up with a different way to solve the issues.

I then yielded the stage to Carol Wapshere for the Sync Service migration toolkit – looking forward to those scripts.

Then a con call interrupted my attendance.

The Meet the experts was fun, I got to meet a lot of folks that came over to get a copy of the book signed. Signing books is still a bit of a surreal experience (today we gave Anil Desai a ride to the airport – he wrote one of the first Windows books I read).

The Party was on the terrace and it was a bit breezy but quite fun with pool tables and a woman wearing dress with a table, yes a table. Bob Bobel of Quest told me that she was a party crasher. Well she certainly was a conversation piece.

Tuesday morning I caught Craig Martin’s session on PowerShell and SSRS to do reporting from FIM. It is brilliant work, however Craig keeps insisting on calling SSRS, scissors! I keep telling him to not to run (PowerShell) with Scissors (SSRS)

After lunch I saw Lutz deliver his session on BYOD and the cloud. Then we prepped for his Wed sessions.

Lutz attended several of the RMS related sessions and said they were very sparsely attended.

Tuesday night I attended the reception for a brief bit and then slipped out to dinner with a relative that lives nearby.

Wednesday, I was about to slip into Bob Bradley’s session on self-healing FIM, when I saw him sit down to breakfast. So after discovering that his session got changed to 9:45 he and I got to talking. That’s a fellow with head full of bright ideas.

Then I attended Lutz’s session on PKI housekeeping. Good job Lutz! I gave him a slide promoting the book, and he told his audience that he was leveraging that for an upgrade to business class on his next flight

Man I was hoping to see Eric Huebner’s session on manipulating data in FIM. Similar to the showdown but come at it from a very different angle, instead of arguing which is better, he discussed some of the performance considerations of one vs. the other and I understand that he even discussed “Request Splitting” in FIM 2010 R2 – allows you to have child requests that do go through the full pipeline and are subject to approval requests!

Then I went to Ehaib Isaac’s session – already blogged a lot about that one. One more mention. Ehaib mentioned he is working on his master’s degree but then showed us a slide of Jobs, Gates, and other billionaire college dropouts. In general more education is correlated with higher pay, although there a few exceptions. Great job!

The lunch on Wednesday had a great dessert! Fortunately I resisted the temptation to have seconds. Phew!

Two people at my lunch table won in the drawing. It was cool to be near two such lucky people!

RCDC Replacement

FIM User Interface Implementation: Replace the rigid RCDC with a customizable UI
Speaker: Eihab Isaac

Eihab delivered a very well-reasoned presentation on the pros and cons of replacing some of the forms, especially the create person (user) form. Excellent demo showing creating multiple requests for creating the user as well as requests for additional attributes, and application access. Great session.

FIM Reporting Craig Martin style

Craig’s session is on how to get data out from the FIM Service and FIM Sync with PowerShell and displaying it with SSRS, which he has dubbed Scissors!

Ok Craig we get it! You have even persuaded me that PowerShell is important! I have started writing scripts. SQL Server of course is still important.

Key is to hook up a pipeline from PowerShell to pass into his custom SSRS PowerShell Data Processing Extension (DPE). Craig uses export-clixml and import-clixml to serialize data before it is expired from the FIM system.

One thing he does point it is that you can’t use the Report Builder, you must use BIDS to create your reports, because DPE’s are not supported with Report Builder

Overall Craig does an excellent job of reusing the tools and capabilities for other areas to show us some really useful stuff with FIM.

Migrating from ILM to FIM

Carol Wapshere delivered an excellent session yesterday at TEC 2012 on the thought process for migrating from MIIS/ILM to FIM.

I loved the incisive logic to focus on the main issue being solved: getting the customer onto supported software (getting the MIIS database off SQL 2000, getting off MIIS/ILM). Avoid the temptation to try and fix everything else at the same time. She had a great list of gotchas. Even more impressive were her discovery scripts designed to analyze the existing implementations and her rubric for estimating the work.

Look what I found in the news

I didn’t even know that Identity and Access Management (IAM) workers had a union!

Of course, imagine my disappointment to learn that it is International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers union.

SharePoint 2010 User Profile Synchronization Service

The SharePoint 2010 User Profile Synchronization Service is really FIM 2010 pre-packaged in a very special way. Need evidence? Look at the tables in User Profile Service Application_SyncDB

See how it has mms_connectorspace, mms_cs_link etc. Those are table commonly found in the FIM sync database. See the attributeInternal, the BindingInternal, all of the Membership* tables those are all part of the FIM Service database. So interestingly enough they have both FIM Service and FIM sync merged into a single DB.