Cool heterogeneous systems road show
Back in my IT days (you know, 4 years ago 
), I spent quite a few years working at a big financial services company. I was known as the "Microsoft" guy in a company that prided itself on using as little Microsoft technology as possible. I lived in a sea of mainframe, Java and Unix/Linux stuff and I got quite used to making it all work together. I think many of you are probably in the same boat as I was and appreciate any and all attempts by vendors to make life easier to integrate. To that end, I just found out about a cool roadshow that's coming to 4 cities in the U.S. in late October and early November, being run by the folks at Windows IT Pro Magazine that presents a number of sessions related to this very topic. The Roadshow is called Tech X World (www.techxworld.com) and will feature some interesting tracks and presentations by some familiar names, including Gil Kirkpatrick of Netpro. Some of the highlights:
1. OS Interoperability - Dustin Puryear will present the OS interoperability track including user mgmt and file/print sharing, application compat and scripting.
2. Directory and Security Integration -- Gil Kirkpatrick will talk about directory and security integration including single sign-on, identity and access management, LDAP and interop among directories.
3. Data Interoperability -- Randy Dyess will speak on data interoperability including heterogeneous database replication, enterprise reporting and data integration for relational databases.
4. Virtualization -- Mike Otey will discuss virtualization -- understanding the technologies and products, managing your virtual environment, availability, backup and recovery, etc.
There's also going to be a panel with folks from IBM and Microsoft, talking about how important it is to work together! That should be worth the price of admission right there . Check it out!