Join Us for TechEd North America 2012

I know that for the immediate area around the convention centre, there is the I-Drive bus. However, I was wondering if anyone had any knowledge or suggestions to share regarding the cheapest/easiest way of getting to & from the airport and also getting to & from Downtown Disney. Many thanks. Philip

Will the site have a refresh and reset the badges and scheduling information from last year? I still see the badge points and rescheduled sessions on my dashboard. Thanks

Thanks!

One of our fantastic community members, I will allow him to introduce himself, made the following attendee party suggestion. What do you think? Do you have other ideas you'd care to share? In Orlando you have the theme parks so obviously no issues there, but for when the venue is in a town where there isn’t a resource like that, I would like to suggest a Movie Party. Take the hall where the keynote is held and set it up like a cinema for adults. Contact the studios or theaters and contract to get the two hottest summer blockbusters coming out. For instance, this summer Thor, Pirates of the Caribbean or X-Men. All those movies geeks love! Show two and provide popcorn, appetizers, beer and wine. Adult fare. Have room on the side to mingle and get food and then traditional seating in the middle. The sound will be cranked up so people who want to mingle can talk in the back and on the sides without disturbing those watching the movie in the middle.

The company I work for, DANTE, manages the GÉANT project which delivers a pan-European high-speed research & education network. As part of that project, there is an Intranet site hosted on SharePoint. One of the services created by the project is eduGAIN – http://edugain.geant.net/ - which is a federated authentication service. It is my intention to extend the GÉANT Intranet to support authentication by eduGAIN, hence my interest in this pre-conference session. Although I understand the principles of claims-based authentication, one of the show-stoppers in my mind is the fact that the authentication process is likely to be devoid of any personal information. For example, if you use Windows Live as your authentication platform and someone signs into Live, all you get is an access token, essentially confirming that the person has signed into Windows Live with a valid username and password. That access token doesn’t tell you *who* the person is, and therefore you cannot divine what level of access you should grant them. Will the pre-conference session go into that area in any way? If I attend the session, will I come away with a better idea of how to solve this conundrum? Regards Philip

I am delivering a project to refresh the servers across the 18 points-of-presence used by the GÉANT network across Europe. The infrastructure we are using is based on Hyper-V (due to our stronger understanding of that technology compared to the competition) but running Red Hat VMs (due to the need for Linux operating system support by the community). It is a medium-term goal to turn this infrastructure into a private cloud service to the GÉANT community. However, in my testing of the beta-release of VMM, there wasn’t any support for delivering templated Linux VMs, only Windows ones. I have not recently looked at the System Center 2012 products to see if the Linux integration has improved although I was encouraged by the news that Microsoft are going to support Red Hat as an OS within Azure. If I attend this pre-conference session, will I learn anything that will help me deliver a cloud service that offers Linux VMs or will the session be entirely focussed on Windows VMs? Regards Philip