Cloud Identity Summit: Come to Our Workshop!
In just about three weeks the who’s who of identity in the cloud is going to converge to Keystone, in the beautiful Rocky Mountains, to talk each other into identity-induced stupor. The Cloud Identity Summit, hosted by our friends at Ping Identity, is an event that I greatly enjoyed last year: and judging from the speakers lineup, this year holds great promises as well!
For the occasion, the egregious1 Brian Puhl, the formidable Laura Hunter and (the …hairy?) yours truly will fight (for three full hours!) that mysterious force that seems to keep IT administrators and developers apart, and will share a stage to tell you about identity in Windows Azure and Office 365. Here there’s the abstract:
Tuesday, July 19, 2011 – 9am to 12pm
Identity in the Microsoft Cloud – Windows Azure, Office 365, and More!
In this unique workshop, come and hear about adopting and implementing the Microsoft Cloud from seasoned identity professionals who have been working with these technologies first-hand from Day One. We’ll begin with an overview and description of the technologies that allow an Identity Management professional to interact with both Windows Azure and Office 365. We’ll then walk through a real-life example of integrating Microsoft Cloud technologies from the perspective of both the application developer and the infrastructure architect. Along the way, we’ll share best practices and tales from the trenches from customers, partners, and Microsoft’s own Evangelists and internal Identity Management Architects.
Now, let me tell you for a moment about Brian and Laura’s work on this. Microsoft IT has been using ADFS2.0 not from Day One, but like from Day –360 
Our Corp STS has been a critical service for our worldwide organization for a pretty long time, and is quite a spectacular deployment across geographies (for a snapshot from more than 1 year ago check out this video). Among other things, this was a fantastic enabler for us to take advantage of cloud services in our LoB applications at a spectacular pace: but this also meant really a lot of work for Brian’s team, who had to experiment with different policies/practices and really see what works. Brian and Laura are going to share some gems you won’t hear from anyone else.
About the developer’s portion of the workshop… well, I’ll refrain from chest-beating (at my shape/age, that would not be a good sight anyway). Let’s just say that I’ve been talking & writing about identity for developers for quite some time, and I hope you’ll find at least some insights in my logorrhea.
If the above was not enough to convince you to come, I don’t know what else to do… oh wait, I do!
For the first 15 people that will register using the code MSFT719%15, our workshop is free. Pretty neat trick.
Well, I registered and booked the flights & the hotel, I just have to rent the car at this point. If you want to partake to the intellectual feast of sharing a table with the likes of Gunnar Peterson, John Shewchuk, Bob Blakley, Eric Sachs, Andrew Nash and many others… you know what to do 
– see you there!
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1In Italian the term “egregio” means “excellent”. I am told that in English “egregious” can mean that as well, but the default meaning is less flattering. Of course I meant it in its “excellent” meaning