TechEd EMEA Status update

If you read my blog before you probably know that I am on-site at TechEd IT-Professionals EMEA in Barcelona as a MCT-Ambassador. Have had the time to go to lots of exciting seminars and more importantly I’ve met lot of people who I only had contact with trough newsgroups and mail before. Haven’t been bloging yesterday, since I could not find any network cable (panic!) and my wifi seems brooken. Finally found a MediaMarkt and now I’m connected via some kind of hotel-isdn-type of connection.

As a MCT-Ambassador for Microsoft Learning I’m in the Ask-The-Experts area and answering questions about learning, certifications and that kind of stuff. It’s a challange to remember all of the certifications, paths and books. But very fun – over my expectations – I think it is due to all the people I get to meet.

Today I attended a seminar about what I thought to be Sharepoint External webs, optimizing and configuring etc. But the seminar was about something completely different (even if it kind of was external access – just not what I expected): it was about IAG (Intelligent Application Gateway). The IAG is a application layer security software which lives on top of ISA-server. Currently only availiable as a appliance but soon also as a virtual appliance (running in Hyper-V I would presume).

The IAG will inspect the health of a visitors computer, for example looking for anti-virus software and based on that health information restrict access to Sharepoint. Whats exciting (realy sexy actualy) is that it does limit specific functionality and not the whole site. For instance you might be able to browse the extranet while not having a anti-virus program but you cannot upload. Great stuff I think and will deep dive into this as soon as I can find the time.

Also discovered, or rather got reminded of, the large number of protocolls and ports used in Sharepoint for all sorts of communication. Could be a real challange to setup a multi-layered setup with segmentations and firewalls. One thing I learned today is that the search query from the WFE actualy use SMB for the querys (not the index transfers – already knew that).. will look into that tonight I think..