TechDays 2009 Community Team

Well you might have heard that TechDays is going to roll across Canada in the Fall of 2009 and while we have 6 of the 7 cities locked we are now starting to focus on content.  And there is a lot of content with 5 tracks each with 8 sessions for a total of 40 sessions over the two days.  So where does it all come from and how do we decide what to add to the agenda?

Well a huge help in the decision making process about what to add to the agenda comes from you, via feedback forms at TechDays, emails to the team, comments and suggestions at user group meetings etc…  All that feedback counts and a prime example of that is a lot of people asked “Where is the SharePoint?” at TechDays 2008 so we’ve added that to our agenda for TechDays 2009. 

With the tracks locked, the more difficult part is filling those tracks with useful and relevant content.  There is a lot of great content from MMS (Microsoft Management Summit), TechEd, TechReady (our internal training conference) that we leverage but sorting through it all is a challenge and this year we got some help from the community.  We selected five (5) people from across Canada, assigned them as community lead to each of the TechDays tracks and sent them to TechEd to hunt for the best content.  They’ll also go over content from other events such as MMS and recommend content that should be included in each of the tracks.

Brad Bird is an IT Professional of 12 years experience. Currently working as an independent consultant associated with Infront Consulting. Brad has more than 8 years under his belt specifically in Windows Networking Administration. Among his specialties are: Windows security, forensics, intrusion prevention and detection, Active Directory implementation, System Center Operations Manager and Data Protection Manager implementation and consulting.

Brad will be looking for content related to security and management of Windows environments including System Center, ForeFront and Windows Server 2008 and R2 including Hyper-V.

Bill Brockbank works for Navantis Inc. a Canadian MS Gold Partner, as a Solution Architect with a background in business process management in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and Workflow technologies K2.net, Windows Workflow Foundation and Caparis Workflow. Bill is also a co-founded for the Toronto SharePoint Camp and an active member in the local SharePoint user community.

Bill will be on the hunt for the best SharePoint, Exchange and Office Communications Server content as well as anything on the Business Productivity Online Suite, SQL 2008 and anything else that helps you implement, manage and customize a collaborative work environment in your organization.

Daniel Nerenberg is an MCT,MCSE,MCITP, and an independent consultant based in Montreal. Daniel has written and consulted on the topics of Windows Deployment, Application virtualization, and Windows infrastructure. Daniel Also writes regular updates for "The Lazy Admin" Tech guidance website at www.thelazyadmin.com.  Daniel is also a member of the Springboard Technical Experts Panel.

Daniel has been tasked with finding the best content around deploying and managing Windows operating systems as well as solving application compatibility issues with ACT 5.5, XP Mode, MED-V as well as, securing the desktop.

 François Tanguay is an agile coach and co-founder of nVentive, a new concept where software development teams leverage coaching and guidance packages to build better software. He presently helps large scale institutions achieve their desired results through VSTS, agile processes and software frameworks. For over 10 years, his modeling skills and inventive ideas have guaranteed interesting discussions.

With Francois expertise in the development field he was best suited to coming back with the best development related content and has a fairly wide scope of sessions to look at.  From VB6 to .NET migration all the way to Application Lifecycle Management and Visual Studio Team Suite there is a lot of great content that Francois will be bringing back from TechEd.

Miguel Carrasco is Vice President of Technology at Anvil Digital, a software development and marketing company in Winnipeg, Manitoba.  With over 10 years experience in the IT industry, Miguel has been involved in over 100 real world projects ranging from software development, team leadership and organization, creative user experience design, and infrastructure projects.  Miguel has always enjoyed design and the user experience angle of software development. 

Miguels mission is to locate the best content with regards to developing applications on the Microsoft platform.  Another rather wide ranging scope with content from developing on Windows 7 to Windows Mobile to the web as well as cloud computing with Microsoft Azure.

Over the next few weeks and months leading up to TechDays Vancouver in September you’ll see blog posts from the community team as to their experiences at TechEd and TechEd Online, why they recommended certain sessions over others and how they helped ensure that TechDays 2009 has the content that ICT professionals in Canada want!