Last week, Crayon organized the 9th Nordic Infrastructure Conference (NIC), labeled the 20/20 Vision Edition. Raymond Comvalius and I each presented two sessions. In this blogpost I share our pictures and most memorable moments.

On Wednesday February 5th, Raymond and I were scheduled for the afternoon flight from Amsterdam Schiphol airport to Oslo Gardermoen airport. We arrived around 4 PM, had time to check in to the Oslo Radisson Blue and even pick up our badges at the venue.

We checked out the rooms we were scheduled to speak in. Afterward, we enjoyed dinner at TGI Friday’s to celebrate our return to Oslo as speakers. (NIC Future Edition was our last time presenting at NIC, back in 2018)

Thursday morning, we ran into the former-Yugoslavian speaker group at breakfast. We caught up with Aleksandar, Jelena and Sasa, and on our way to the room to collect our stuff, we ran into Alexander Solaat Rodland.

I presented 60 minutes on the eight most common mistakes on my Hybrid Identity journeys and how organizations can prepare to do the same. I discussed Azure AD Connect, AD FS and Continuous Integration in room 8, while Raymond took pictures and laughed out loud in the audience.

In the afternoon, Raymond presented 60 minutes on his OneDrive migration adventures in the same room, from the same (suspended) stage. Now, I was the one taking pictures and laughing.

After our sessions, we prepared for our next sessions in the speaker lounge. At 5:30 PM, we joined the Ask the Experts panel with Alex de Jong, Andy Malone, Chris Jackson and Mikael Nystrom. Afterwards we enjoyed the pizza and beers at the expo. As a group, together with John Craddock, Aleksandar Nikolic, Alex and Chris, we sang along with Datarock and their greatest hits at the NIC Party.

As sensible presenters, we opted to go to bed early to be fit for the next day.
(Yes, I’ve made that mistake at NIC before…)

On Friday morning, we enjoyed breakfast with Mikael Nystrom and Johan Arwidmark. We checked out after breakfast and headed to the speaker lounge to prepare some more. Demos don’t create themselves, you know…

Around lunch I found some time to visit the expo and meet with friends and partners at the expo booth.

At 2PM I presented on managed Active Directory Federation Services with Azure AD Connect. I demoed how to create an AD FS Farm, manage a pre-existing AD FS Farm and how to renew the service certificate throughout the AD FS infrastructure with as little as six clicks.

At 3:15, Raymond started his presentation on the Azure AD App Proxy and how to work with it instead of setting up perimeter networks, managing firewalls, adapting code to make your web-based applications do multi-factor authentication, etc.

Straight after Raymond’s session, we headed back to Oslo Gardermoen airport on the Flytoget. We had dinner in the OSL Lounge and flew straight back to Amsterdam. I joined Raymond in his journey home, as my car was parked in his driveway. From his home, it was only a short 35-minute drive back home to my family.

THANK YOU

Thank you to Crayon for inviting me as a speaker to another great Nordic Infrastructure Conference. Thank you to all the attendees, especially the people in my sessions!