Interact 2008 Summary, Day 1

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I am now wrapping up the third and final day of the Interact 2008 (not to be confused with Interact 2008) conference.  I don’t know what I can say about it other than to say that is has been time extraordinarily well spent.  There are many things that you do in life that are worthwhile days; as far as careers go, this ranks among the most useful days I’ve ever had.  I don’t intend that statement to be either hyperbole or summarily discardable.  There has been absolutely fantastic face time with Microsoft employees and a wonderful opportunity to interact (no pun intended) with key vendors and other attendees.  Although I’m completely saturated and exhausted, I’ll try to give a rundown of the sessions and events.  First up, the sessions that I attended.

Tuesday

Keynote (Gurdeep Singh Pall)

Overall a great keynote, but very similar in content to the keynote delivered at VoiceCon 2008.  I can’t hold that too much against him since I’m sure that writing new keynote speeches for every event he speaks at probably isn’t and shouldn’t be his priority.  That said, I recommend you watch the actual keynote from VoiceCon rather than reading my poor summary of what Gurdeep said.

Panel on Planning Voice Architecture and Deployment in Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 (Mahendra Sekaran; Sean Olson; John Kenerson; Francois Doremieux; Russell Bennett; Jens Trier Rasmussen; Ken Ewert)

I tremendously enjoyed this session; it was an open forum for anyone with a question to address some of the brightest minds on the OCS team.  The people that stood out to me in particular were Mahendra Sekaran, who answered my question about topologies with 100-person outsource shops (and whether we needed to deploy a pool/enterprise voice equipment at that location); Sean Olson, who answered most of the questions about general vision; Francois Doremieux, who handled many questions about actual deployments; and Russell Bennett, who contributed intelligent comments to several questions.  I particularly enjoyed the range of knowledge available in the room, it seemed that there were answers for every question asked.

Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Edge Drill Down (Wajih Yahyaoui)

This was a very good session on details for the various edge servers.  Wajih has a very noticeable accent, but was obviously passionate about the subject matter, so it was a real pleasure to listen to him.  He was able to handle most of the questions in the room, but it was helpful that several other knowledgeable Microsoft personnel were there also.  The conversation had one major interruption when a guy who I considered to be acting very belligerently.  The contention was based around whether OCS’s requirement to open port ranges in external firewalls unnecessarily creates security vulnerabilities.  Neil Deason responded that a firewall is only ultimately secure if all ports are closed: it makes no difference whether there are 10,000 ports or one port open, your network is vulnerable if you have ports open in your firewall.  While I don’t think that response was a good response overall, the point of the response should be considered sufficient.  The point of what Neil was saying is that firewalls are only one element of a properly hardened network’s defenses.  Hardening a network involves hardening multiple elements, not just the firewall.  The firewall-only approach is typically described like an M&M: crunchy on the outside, chewy on the inside.  If you have a network defended only by a firewall, your network is vulnerable to internal attacks.  Although research shows that most attacks originate from outside the network, the same research shows that an alarming percentage of breaches originate from inside the network.  See http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=15439 for links to credible sources.

Advanced Validation and Troubleshooting for OCS 2007 (Byron Spurlock, Tom Laciano)

Byron and Tom handled this session on how to ascertain the source of an OCS 2007 problem.  Both presenters were enjoyably humorous, considering the amount of time we’d been sitting that day.  We got a chance to see Byron use a number of tools such as the Snooper tool, validation wizards and more.  As I sat there, I realized how much I would have benefited from knowing that those tools existed a few weeks ago, when I spent a significant amount of time using Wireshark to diagnose what was wrong with OCS.  Afterwards, I went to one of the Coffee Chats with Tom and sat for a while as he explained in detail what subject names and subject alternative names are necessary for certificates in various scenarios.

Evening Event: Surfing @ Wave House

In the evening, we relaxed on the beach at the Wave House.  It was a great time breathing the (very) cool salt air, throwing back a few drinks, and doing some surfing!  I stunk (figuratively), but here’s a shot, courtesy of my colleague David DeWinter who went with me: