Just over a month ago, in January 2013, I had the extreme luck and pleasure to be able to attend the first annual Redmond IAM Summit, hosted by the Oxford Computer Group at the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Seattle. I say luck, because I live in Perth Western Australia – and it was only by chance that I was passing through Seattle around the same time the summit was on, on the way home from visiting family in Canada. Having attended this year, I’ve just received an e-mail inviting me to register for the 2014 summit, and it looks like OCG are stepping things up a notch, as this year’s conference isn’t just IAM, but also directory.
This isn’t a huge surprise, as with the recent announcement that The Experts Conference (TEC), the conference that was all things FIM, IAM and Directory, is no longer happening, there’s a huge gap to fill. And, OCG are extremely well placed to fill that gap, being what most would consider the premier global Microsoft Partner when it comes to FIM.
With regards to this year’s conference, the thing I enjoyed most was the networking opportunities it afforded. I got to meet people like Dave Lundell, Craig Martin and other names I’ve seen posting for years, as well as a number of the OCG and other consultants from across North America. Content-wise, I would have liked to have seen more FIM-specific content – I’ve never been to TEC, but from what I see of the presentation briefs, TEC’s content appears to be more targeted at consultants working in the field, while I guess I felt the IAM summit was more targeted at clients. I’m sure that will change as the summit grows, however.
Another interesting thing I found about the conference was seeing some of the case studies presented. Overall, I found they tended to be a lot more simple than some of the solutions I’ve had to deploy. I had previously thought that no FIM deployment was simple – now I am beginning to wonder if there really are solutions that are as simple as out-of-the-box deployment.
Anyway, the early bird rate for this year’s conference is $US650 – people who attended this year get a discount on top of that if they register via March 31 (you should have received an e-mail from OCG explaining this). Registration is here. It’ll be interesting to see how much bigger a event this will be in 2014 in the wake of TEC’s demise.
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