Yesterday, speakers from the  Hyper-V.nu, System Center User Group, Windows Azure User Group, Dutch PowerShell User Group, PASS (SQL) and the Windows Management User Group delivered the Experts Live 2013 event with over 30 sessions in 6 tracks. The closing keynote featured André Kuipers, the famous Dutchman who has flown two space missions and has been in space for over six months.

My employer was also present at this event with its ICT Expert Talks booth, interviewing speakers on their session subjects. You might remember this setup from the 2013 Dutch TechDays.

You can watch all the 5 – 10 minute interviews for that day (17 in total) on the ICT Expert Talks YouTube channel. Both Martijn Vinke (our head of Marketing and Communications) and Raymond Comvalius interviewed speakers and, of course, André Kuipers.

Luckily, there was some time in the busy ICT Expert Talks schedule for an interview between Raymond and me:

After a brief introduction where I help Raymond with my MVP area of expertise (I’m not an Active Directory MVP, but a fivefold Directory Services MVP), Raymond’s first question is on the relationship between Active Directory and Bring-Your-Own.

Since most people refer to Active Directory as Active Directory Domain Services, I think that there’s little relationship between them, except for the new msDS-Device object class in the Windows Server 2012 R2 schema. However, when you look at Active Directory Certificate Services, Active Directory Federation Services and the Azure Active Directory, you’ll see that these are three products, truly enabling Bring-Your-Own with their sexy new features.

Raymond and me then speculate on the future of Azure Active Directory. We both feel it’s going to be big, but we’ll just have to see where it goes… I’ll be the first, though, to acknowledge the power of Azure Active Directory and its Single Sign-on (SSO) capabilities: I feel Directory Services are the base layer of cloud computing.

Raymond then refers to the Web Application Proxy in Windows Server 2012 R2. I think this technology is really cool… although Raymond couldn’t get it to work during the demo in our two sessions. It’s an integrated ADFS proxy and a reverse proxy with pre-auth, making it possible to give employees and partners access to applications and services inside the network, without fumbling with DirectAccess and VPN connections. It’s not there yet, but it is coming together. Then, it might even be the successor to the Threat Management Gateway (TMG).

Related blogposts

I’ll be speaking at Experts Live 2013
Behind the scenes of the ICT Expert Talks
Pictures of the Dutch 2013 TechDays