NAP stealing the show at RSA 2007 - San Francisco

I am so proud of the NAP and the team that works on it. We are kicking some serious butt at RSA right now.

Bill Gates and Craig Mundie (Microsoft’s Chief Research and Strategy Officer) gave a keynote named “The Imperative to Connect: Advancing Trust in Computing” (transcript). They discussed NAP and how our own internal IT group has a deployment of NAP + IPsec implemented right now.

Craig then came down to the show floor and met with the NAP team and our partners. He was excited to see 802.1x switches from 8 different vendors all being controlled by our Longhorn Server Network Policy Server (NPS) using NAP. It is a hot demo, all working seamlessly quarantining the client and moving him from a healthy VLAN to a quarantined one so he can be fixed-up / remediated.

He also saw demos from McAfee, LG N-Sys and ConSentry, all fully integrated with NAP.

Ram, Jeff (yours truly) and Mike throw it down at the NAP booth.

If you see Calvin at the show, you can see at the speed of light. He is everywhere.

Last night, we went out on the town. First we went to a NAP Press / Analyst reception. I met folks from Gartner and Forrester. It was an awesome setting, in a cartoon art gallery. An artist (Zach Trenholm) made a “Quick-Sketch Caricature” of me. It came out pretty cool.

My boss Mark then took us around his stomping grounds in the San Francisco area. We saw the "Big Trouble in little China" area and Little Italy. We also walked through Jack Kerouac’s old stomping grounds. We then went out to a nice dinner at a Brazilian restaurant - Mangarosa. Wow; can you say Brazilian BEEF (with a capital B)?!?

What a trip. 2007 is the year of NAP - the #2 feature in Longhorn Server (behind only the OS itself). I can’t wait to write the blog post “NAP / Longhorn Server ships” later this year. Feel free to hold your breath.

- Jeff and the mighty NAP team