Some opportunities are too much fun to pass up on. So, when the aOS Community asked me if I’d be willing to help them out by speaking at their Aix-en-Provence event, of course, I said “Yes”.

About aOS

aOS Community (which stand for Azure, Office 365, SharePoint) is an international non-profit gathering of professionals working on the Microsoft Collaborative platform.

The aOS Community is an independent organization, open to all, whose members aim to share and exchange ideas around Microsoft technologies in the area of Azure, Office 365 and SharePoint.

aOS organizes, participates and supports event, promoting the sharing and exchange of these ideas, targeting French-speaking countries, primarily, but expanding globally.

aOS is open to everybody.

About ‘Journée AOS Aix-en-Provence’

You are invited by CMD (Cloud Mobility Datacenter) and aOS (azure Office 365 SharePoint) to the third of the aOS Aix-en-Provence meeting at Cési Aix en Provence on June 21st, 2018. For an entire day, experts in Office 365 and Azure share their experiences from the field.

About my session

I’ll deliver a 45-minute session from 1:30 PM to 2:15PM in the Office 365 track:

Seven ways Identity enriches your Office 365 and Azure experience

Azure and Office 365 rely on Azure Active Directory as their identity store.

As tenfold MVP, I think I know a little about identity. My experience with numerous organizations, ranging from enterprises to small business, have taught me that good identity is important to embracing cloud services. I’ll show you seven ways identity enriches the experience you, your colleagues and your customers have when using Azure and Office 365, in my typical humorous but straight to the point style.

You’re welcome!

We welcome you on June 21st at CESI in Aix-en-Provence! Access is free of charge, but you will need to register for it on EventBrite.

I studied French for six years when I was in high school. As I’m arranging travel for this event and communicating with the event organizers, it’s all coming back to me. I’m looking forward to it!

Advertised as the biggest Microsoft IT Pro event in the Netherlands, Experts Live Netherlands will take place Tuesday June 19th, 2018 at Cinemec Ede.

As at previous Experts Live Netherlands editions, you’ll find several DirTeam bloggers presenting at this event.

About Experts Live

Experts Live is an independent platform for IT Professionals on Microsoft solutions. A platform for and by the community. Almost every year, Experts Live organizes its knowledge event in the Netherlands. Started as an idea from a small group of Dutch Microsoft MVPs, Experts Live has become the largest Microsoft community event in the Netherlands, with over a thousand visitors.

Both national and international speakers update the visitors in one day on the latest Microsoft technologies. Subsequently, through the years, many famous and notorious speakers delivered sessions on the Experts Live events.

This year, Experts Live is hosted at CineMec in Ede, the Netherlands again, and scheduled for Tuesday June 19th, 2018. The event offers over 40 break-out sessions, an opening keynote and a closing keynote.

About my session

I’ll deliver one 60-minute session in the security track:

Azure Multi-Factor Authentication: Who do you think you are?

4:15PM – 5:15PM, Expo Theater

Passwords have been introduced to solve the authentication problems decades ago. Today, we have different challenges and we need more in-depth solutions for authentication assurance. Office365- and Azure Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) offer this solution for both your organizations’ cloud and on-premises resources. Your organization will no longer be in the dark on the person on the other side of the line: it’s really you and you’ve got the means to prove it!

With several large and complex Azure MFA implementations and upgrades under their belts, Sander Berkouwer (Directory Services and Enterprise Mobility MVP) shares his experiences with these products, their licensing, on-premises deployment scenarios, end-user expectations and the inner workings of the product line-up, including MFA Server, the Security Graph and Azure AD Identity Protection.

Looking for your next-generation identity primer? Look no further!

Join us!

Dave Stork is co-presenting with Jetze Mellema on moving mailboxes cross-premises, from on-premises, from other groupware solutions and between Office 365 tenants. It’s a session you don’t want to miss, either!

Although it’s been a while (almost 19 months after the previous Experts Live Netherlands edition), I’m looking forward to it. I hope you are, too.

Although over 80% of the tickets has already been sold, tickets are still available, so pick up yours before June 14th Dutch and join us!

Last week, I presented at Techorama Belgium 2018 in Antwerp.

In terms of travel, this was the ideal event for me, since the organization scheduled my presentation for the last time slot on Day 1. Being an early starter, this meant I could work a normal day (for me, that’s 7AM – 3:30PM), then travel to Antwerp, throw my slide deck together and still be in time for the session, starting at 5:45 PM.

On Wednesday May 23, I arrived at around 16:30 at Kinepolis. I talked to a couple of speakers and a couple of attendees, who happened to be former colleagues. Then, I put the finishing touches to my slide deck and headed over to room 16 for my presentation on Azure AD Connect.

After my session it was time for the Techorama speaker buffet in the Lindner Hotel, next to Antwerp Central train station. Leaving my car at Kinepolis for the night, I hopped on the shuttle to the hotel, checked in, and enjoyed the evening with my fellow speakers.

After a good night’s rest and some breakfast, I opted for the shuttle again to get me back to Kinepolis. Hanging out with some of the speakers, having lunch and attending sessions were the highlights of this day.

After a couple of drinks at the Techorama 5 Year Celebration, where I mostly spoke to the guys from Synergics and Fabian Williams, I drove home with a smile on my face.

Thank you!

Thanks to all the people attending, sitting in on my session and, of course, the people who stuck around after my session for the interesting discussions. Thanks to the Techorama organization for making it better every year and, of course, my fellow speakers who are always fun to hang out with.

Last week, I was at Heliview’s 2018 IAM Congress in Nieuwegein, the Netherlands. My employer, SCCT, offered a booth, besides many great names like Okta, One Identity, Bomgar, Thycotic and CyberArk.

As a Microsoft Cloud-focused Systems Integrator (SI), we were in a good spot to tell attendees how to leverage their identity and access management, using whatever product on display.

We arrived early to set up the booth and enjoy breakfast. After that, we took a look at the main stage, where preparations were in full swing for a privacy panel.

At 11:20 AM, I was scheduled to present for 25 minutes on going password-less.

As not a lot of organizations focus in this area (yet), we thought it would be a good idea to talk about SCCT, our company and our vision, but most of all about Windows Hello for Business and the FIDO 2.0 login possibilities in Azure AD-joined Windows 10 version 1803 devices.

After the session, we enjoyed some more conversations with customers and potential customers, to better understand their needs, their worries about GDPR and the legacy stuff that’s keeping them back. Our team has a lot of answers and offers help in many of these areas.

I enjoyed Heliview’s IAM congress.

Thanks to all the people attending, sitting in on my session and, of course, the people that took the time out of their busy schedule to talk to us. We felt we brought unique value to the event as the only booth without products to sell.

Hat tip

Carlo Shaeffer has made SCCT’s presence possible at Heliview’s 2018 IAM Congress.

I’m back at Techorama Belgium! I’m proud to announce that, just like last year, I’m presenting at Belgium’s biggest Microsoft IT professional and developer conference.

About Techorama

Techorama Belgium is a yearly international technology conference that takes place at Kinepolis Metropolis Antwerp. Techorama welcomes about 1500 attendees, a healthy mix between developers, IT Professionals, Data Professionals and SharePoint professionals. Techorama’s commitment is to create a unique conference experience with quality content and the best speaker line-up.

This year’s Techorama is a special edition, because Techorama Belgium celebrates its fifth anniversary from May 22, 2018 to May 24, 2018.

The Day 1 Techorama 2018 keynote is delivered by Steven van Belleghem. Day 2 keynotes, are delivered straight after lunch by Jeffrey Snover, Sander Hoogendoorn, Dandy Weyn, Paula Januszkiewicz, and others. Other national and International speakers you might have heard of also joined the line-up, including Mirko Colemberg, Dieter Wijckmans, Tim de Keukelaere, John Craddock, Johan Delimon,  Peter Daalmans, Rasmus Hald and Thomas Maurer.

About my session

I’m presenting a 60-minute session on Wednesday May 23:

Under the hood of Azure AD Connect

Wednesday May 23 2018, 5:45PM – 6:45PM, Room 16

Did you ever wonder how Azure AD Connect works? Do you want to know what connector spaces, the metaverse, tens of rules, attribute flows, soft matching, write-back and source anchors do and how they help you synchronize objects and their attributes between Active Directory Domain Services, LDAP stores and Azure AD.

After attending this session you’ll have the tools to meet the hardest Azure AD Connect challenges out there. You’ll also have laughed really loud, I promise.

Join us!

Techorama 2018 has sold out. When you’re among the lucky people to have grabbed a ticket, join me for this session.

We’ll have a lot of fun!

On Wednesday May 2nd, I featured in a webcast from the editors of Redmond Magazine. This webcast, sponsored by Okta, is now available on demand.

Best Practices for Pulling Identities Together: What Enterprises Are Doing Now to Stay Secure

In this editorial webcast, Lafe Low from Redmond Magazine, Daniel Lu from Okta and I walk through the best practices organizations are using to corral all the accounts an average employee uses today to log into tens of applications, and make sure these accounts are being used in a way that doesn’t compromise the rest of the organization.

Questions

Questions we covered included:

• How are organizations unifying their identity and authentication processes through Single Sign-On, especially in organizations with an Active Directory environment?
• How do organizations gain visibility into the SaaS apps that are being used by their employees?
• How can organizations enforce secure password policies for their users on SaaS apps that are hosted by third parties?
• What kind of education is most effective in preventing users from reusing passwords or otherwise skirting company policies?

Watch it now

Come away from this session with actionable tactics for minimizing the gaps in your company’s identity and authentication security posture.

Register for the on-demand version of the webcast here.

We’re sure you’ll enjoy it.