KEY 100 - When is Moving to the Cloud Right for You?

David Chow - Microsoft

You have heard all the hype about what the cloud can do for it. Can I trust it? What are the hidden costs and tradeoffs I am making. How much control will I lose? In this session, you will learn about what are the questions you should ask about your cloud provider and your own organization to make the right decision.

CLD 101 - Demystifying the Cloud: Defining and Comparing IaaS, PaaS & SaaS

John Sanderson - Microsoft

 The "Cloud" is a very hot topic today. There are many acronyms, companies, offerings and dis-information about what a Cloud Platform or Cloud Offering truly is. In this session, we will talk through the many offerings, comparing and contrasting the differences, benefits and disadvantages of the major players.

 

(This will not be a Microsoft focused discussion)

CLD 102 - Cloud Today- Where are we and how can I achieve results?

Jason Carolan - ViaWest

Jason will provide an overview of cloud computing, and how to use hybrid technologies, services, and solutions to help solve IT efficiency and save costs. The majority of cloud users today are looking at cost savings, but there's several other benefits — learn how to use them in your business today.

CLD 103 - Architectural patterns for the cloud

Brian Prince - Microsoft

Enough mushy, baby talk about the cloud. Let's roll up our sleeves and talk about some real patterns for how to use the cloud in the real world. Hint: As much as some vendors want you to think so, it doesn't require you to move everything to the cloud. Leave with some concrete ways to use the cloud in your existing world.

CLD 104 - Leveraging Social -- in the Cloud!

Seth Weddon - Statera

In this session, join Statera and NewsGator, Microsoft's 2011 US Partner of the Year, as they discuss social in the cloud. First, attendees will be given an overview of social collaboration, including a discussion of current industry trends. Then, NewsGator and Statera will discuss ways in which some of their flagship customers are leveraging the cloud for their collaboration needs. Afterwards, NewsGator will explain how they leveraged Microsoft's Azure offering to create Glassboard, a social mobile application for private group sharing. Attendees will learn how Glassboard was architected as well as how it integrates with NewsGator Social Sites for Microsoft SharePoint, to aggregate and centralize Glassboard's private, group conversations in the Social Sites Activity Stream.

CLD 105 - Bringing Cloud Email to the Masses with Office 365

Ron Robbins - Quest Software

Have you decided to move from your on-premises Exchange or other cloud email solution to Office 365? You are not alone! Many organizations have decided to make the jump, but are researching how they should prepare and what tool they should use to migrate.

 

Attend this session to hear Ron Robbins, Product Manager at Quest Software review the benefits you will experience with Exchange Online and discuss things to consider when migrating to the new cloud email solution. Ron will perform a live demonstration of Quest's new cloud-based migration product, OnDemand Migration for Email. You will see first-hand how easy it is to migrate mailboxes to Office 365 quickly and securely.

 

Why attend this session?

• Learn the key differences between Exchange Online and its on-premises version.
• Understand how to prepare for a successful migration to Office 365.
• View a live demonstration of Quest OnDemand Migration for Email.

PRE 101 - What is the cloud, why do I care, and how do I get there?

Phil Wicklund - Invited Speaker

If you follow the technology industry, you have probably noticed that everyone suddenly seems to be "going to the cloud" these days. What's all the fuss about? Or more simply put, what is the cloud and why do I care? The conference keynote seeks to level the playing field for attendees by answering these key questions around the ROI behind Microsoft's cloud-based technologies. You'll learn about key cloud characteristics, as well as cloud models such as building your own private cloud, or perhaps deploying to the public, community, and/or hybrid clouds. You'll see how IT solutions can be taken to the cloud on the Office 365 and Azure platforms and how these platforms integrate with one another to create advanced, cloud-based line of business applications. Lastly, you'll come away with an understanding of how to begin the process of planning for and migrating to the cloud.

PRE 102 - Cloud-based Software Architecture Learnings from the Field

Ricardo Villalobos - Microsoft

One of the challenges that many companies and organizations face when trying to take advantage of the cloud is making sure that the architecture of their applications are ready for a distributed computing environment. Most of the traditional, legacy software patterns assume that the different layers or modules will be deployed on single, non-clustered instances, ignoring the benefits of following a design-for-failure approach. Existing methodologies for software architecture are rooted in the principles of object-oriented and n-tier designs. While these approaches worked superbly for small scale systems, they begin to break down in highly distributed, loosely-coupled cloud-based implementations. During this session, lessons learned after working with some of the most forward-thinking and innovative ISVs in the field will be presented, providing concrete examples of how to externalize storage and caching services and how to decouple tiers using a façade pattern approach. We will also deep dive into Command-Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS), which is an emerging cloud pattern that offers significant advantages, such as managing concurrency conflicts, avoiding data staleness, and being able to adapt to changing business requirements. Specific real-life situations will be used to illustrate these scenarios, emphasizing the benefits that different companies have found after applying them and migrating their applications to the Microsoft Windows Azure platform.

OFF 101 - Deploying Office 365 for the Small Business

Brett Hill, MVP - Invited Speaker

In this session, Brett will demonstrate how to deploy Office 365 in a small business environment. This session includes difficult to find information about the differences between the small business plan and the enterprise plans as well as demonstrations of domain validation, desktop deployment and mail migration options. Packed with demonstrations and practical advice, by the end of this session, you'll have a solid understanding of how to quickly get setup with Office 365.

OFF 102 - Office 365 – Value for the Enterprise

Sean McNeill - Catapult Systems

This session will present how an Enterprise class organization can benefit from a move to Office 365. Benefits discussed will include:
• Integration with existing Active Directory environment for Single SignOn
• Hybrid Solution to enable integration between on-premises and cloud based mailboxes
• Move from a CapEx model to OpEx model with predictable per user monthly pricing
• Integration of Lync Presence and IM functionality into daily work life
• Exchange and SharePoint Online features and benefits
• Free up IT resources to be more proactive and strategic
• Let Microsoft handle the patching and upgrades going forward
This session with talk about both the technical and financial benefits and value for a move to Office 365.

OFF 103 - Authentication in the Cloud – DirSync, Single Sign-on, and ADFS in Office 365

Patrick O'Horo - Microsoft

This session will offer an in-depth look at how DirSync and Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) are used in Office 365 to enable Single Sign-On (SSO) with corporate credentials in the cloud. We will also look at how ADFS can be leveraged to limit client access to Office 365 services based on the location of the client or the service being accessed by using claims.
• Cloud ID's
• DirSync
• Federation
• Client Access Policies

OFF 104 - Maximize MS Project 2010 with Office 365 for Project Management Success

Dux Raymond Sy, MVP PMP - Invited Speaker

Microsoft Project 2010 has proved to be instrumental in driving project management success for many organizations. With the advent of cloud computing, Microsoft's Office 365 has lowered the barriers to enhance collaboration amongst project teams.

 

In this session, you'll learn how to effectively create a Microsoft Project Plan, create a SharePoint-based Project Management Information System (PMIS) with Office 365 and integrate Microsoft Office tools to support your project management initiatives.

In addition, we'll cover best practices around utilizing SharePoint with Microsoft Office, Lync and mobile devices to empower project teams to share relevant information, facilitate better collaboration and build project management dashboards.

 

All PMP certified attendees will earn 1 PDU for attending this session.

OFF 105 - Identity in Office 365

Phil Wicklund - Invited Speaker

Security in the cloud is a significant topic. Cloud customers want to know their options, including managing cloud based accounts, partner accounts, domain controller co-location, active directory synchronization, as well as creating a federation trust between a local ADFS 2.0 service and Office 365. This session will compare the pros and cons of each approach, which approaches work for standard versus dedicated, as well as step by step guidance on how to setup the trusts. Additionally, we'll also discuss identity management with remote PowerShell.

SPO 101 - SharePoint Cloud Readiness – Your Top 10 Considerations

Shawn Beeson, RBA Consulting

Is your organization using SharePoint today? Are you curious what it will take to move your SharePoint environment to the cloud? What are the things you can and should be doing today to ensure a painless move in the future? This session will cover the Top Ten things every company should be doing and reviewing to ensure that their environments and customizations will be cloud-ready !

SPO 102 - Moving SharePoint Development and Testing to the Cloud

Chris Riley, CloudShare

The great thing about SharePoint is that it is a platform, allowing organizations to build countless business applications to suite nearly infinite needs. The challenge in working with SharePoint, is that it is a platform, giving so much flexibility that controlling projects and extending the platform is painful. The Cloud offers an opportunity to meet the best practice of having isolated development and testing environments without additional licenses or hardware. SharePoint development and testing in the cloud reduces the time it takes to start a new SharePoint project, reduces costs, and protects the configurations already deployed in production. In this session find out why Development and Testing in the cloud works, how to plan for it, and how to more reliably and rapidly grow your SharePoint deployment.

SPO 103 - Building Enterprise Applications in the Cloud using SharePoint Online and Azure

Faraz Khan & Seth Crichton, RBA Consulting

Everybody is talking about the cloud these days. Have you evaluated your options for hosting/migrating enterprise applications to the cloud? What technology do you use? SharePoint Online, Windows Azure or SQL Azure? What are the limitations you might run into? How about a combination of all these to achieve even more flexibility, control and power? This session will show you how to build enterprise applications that combine SharePoint Online with Windows and SQL Azure to build powerful solutions in the cloud.

SPO 104 - To Host or Not to Host: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Decisions

Gina Montgomery, Fpweb.net

This presentation was created to get people thinking about various ways of implementing SharePoint. It is not meant to be prescriptive or to be used as a roadmap, but more as a set of talking points around hosting vs on premise SharePoint.

 

Four options are covered in this presentation:

• On Premise
• Office 365
• Mega Providers
• SharePoint Specific Hosting

 

Audience: General

SPO 105 - Getting the Most Value out of Your SharePoint Cloud Investment

Stephen Cawood, MVP Metalogix

The value of hybrid cloud scenarios, which leverages both on-premises SharePoint servers and SharePoint online, is being discovered on a daily basis by organizations looking to maximize their SharePoint environments. By synching Microsoft SharePoint servers with Microsoft Office 365 or BPOS, organizations can deliver powerful flexibility and high availability for business-critical enterprise content.

 

To get the most from your adoption of Microsoft Online Services, however, you need to address your planning, migration and ongoing cloud management in a holistic way. Join Stephen Cawood as he discusses the best practices for your organization to take full advantage of SharePoint Online, including the benefits to organizing content and site collections before moving and preparing end users for improved functionality and a different look and feel.

SPT 100 - Disaster Recovery -- meticulous wins, heroism loses

Jim Surlow - Via West

This session is geared for those who build or are considering building their own clouds. This is a vendor agnostic presentation about DR experiences with an emphasis on storage -- though other dependencies will also be covered. Size, complexity, rate of architecture change (known & unknown), network latency and cost constraints affect chances of success. Have you considered these types of issues before agreeing that you can do this?

ST 101 - Leveraging the Cloud with Microsoft CRM Online

Jake Horn - Pariveda

 

Microsoft CRM Online presents a unique opportunity for businesses to leverage the cloud. The MS CRM Online platform can empower you to build process-driven solutions using both the built in CRM functionality and the extended CRM (xRM) capabilities. These solutions are quick to build and quick to deploy.

 

In this session, we will focus on the following:

• Benefits the Microsoft CRM Online platform provides architects, developers and business analysts to build solutions for their firm
• Examples of business and technical situations where it makes sense to adopt the MSCRM Online platform and when it doesn't
• How Microsoft CRM Online fits in the overall Microsoft cloud strategy

 

ST 102 - How to deploy Microsoft SQL Server on a Private Cloud

Bernardo Zamora - Microsoft

Moving your SQL Server workloads to a private cloud can bring many benefits to your organization but often companies find the database workload the hardest to virtualize without comprising performance. In this session you will learn about the benefits a private cloud can bring to SQL Server and how Microsoft collaborated with HP to design an appliance that guarantees high performance for your SQL Server instances that can be deployed in days.

ST 103 - When Worlds Collide: HTML5 Meets the Cloud

David Pallmann - Neudesic

What does HTML5 mean for cloud computing, and vice-versa? When two revolutions are happening simultaneously you can expect interesting synergies and interactions. Even as cloud computing is profoundly transforming the back end, HTML5 and devices are profoundly transforming the front end. When these worlds collide we can achieve something truly remarkable: rich, take-anywhere immersive experiences backed by on-demand, elastic services running at global scale. Both worlds are driving changes in the way we design software, and good solution architecture demands they be considered jointly. In this session you'll see how HTML5 and the cloud combine architecturally, illustrated by example.

ST 104 - Introduction to Windows Intune - manage and secure your PC's in the cloud.

Toni Bollinger - Microsoft

Join us in learning about Windows Intune - Microsoft's latest cloud offering for managing and securing PC's.

 

 

ST 105 - Windows Intune Technical deep dive and demonstrations.

Richard Ruiz - Microsoft

Join us in a deep dive session about Microsoft's latest cloud offering for managing and securing PC's. We will discuss the technical features Intune delivers and show demos on the various management & security scenarios available through Intune.

AZR 101 - Windows Azure Design Patterns

David Pallman - Neudesic

In order to design great cloud solutions architects need to understand the design patterns intrinsic to their cloud platform. In this session Windows Azure MVP and author David Pallmann will review the design patterns inherent in the Windows Azure platform services, followed by a discussion of application patterns for combining those services. Design patterns will be reviewed for compute, storage, relational data, communication, security, and networking. Key patterns will be illustrated with application examples.

AZR 102 - Top Four Azure Trends for Innovation

Mark Turner - Avanade

It is no secret that Cloud computing is here to stay. Today, Azure is being used as a cloud services development, hosting and management platform but what exactly does that mean? How does knowing this help you plan and execute a roadmap that will increase innovation and reliability while lowering costs? What are the challenges to determine "what specific benefits will a PaaS cloud bring to my organization?"

 

In this presentation, we will discuss the top four ways Azure is being used to leverage the cloud to drive innovation that translates into new opportunities. Real life scenarios and case studies will be used to showcase each of these trends and show what unique qualities Windows Azure brings to the mix and, more importantly, the benefits it is bringing these customers.

AZR 103 - Integration of Azure and SharePoint 2010

Juan Larios, MVP - Invited Speaker

Is your organization unsure how Azure and SharePoint 2010 work together? Attend this session on the key advantages and disadvantages of putting your data in the cloud. This session will also look at some key business use cases where SharePoint 2010 can leverage Azure. 

• WCF JQuery, Azure and SharePoint
• Bing Maps integration with Azure
• Building your own Azure powered CDN

AZR 104 - Securing Azure Hosted Services, the Easy Way

Adam Grocholski, MVP - RBA Consulting

Authentication and authorization are key components of most line of business applications. However, identity management is not a trivial task, especially when it comes to extending identity management to the cloud. In this session we'll look at how you can use the Windows Azure Access Control Service (ACS) to simplify identity management for applications running on the Windows Azure platform. We'll start by covering the basics of identity management and ACS. From there we'll look at how to do create an ACS namespace, integrate identity providers and relying parties, create token transformation rules to provide consistent claims, establish a trust between ACS and your ASP.NET application, test the integration, and automate the management of your ACS namespaces.

AZR 105 - Keeping an Eye on the Cloud: Azure Diagnostics

Mike Erickson, Neudesic

When an application is running in Windows Azure it can be difficult to know what is happening. In this session we will cover the techniques that you can implement to gather diagnostic information from the instances running in Azure. We will discuss how you can instrument your code to help you understand what is happening while it is running. We will also look at how you can connect to instances that are running in Azure.

PRI 102 - Build a Private Cloud in 1,000 Easy Steps

Harold Wong - Microsoft

With all the media hype around cloud computing today, I'm sure there is also quite a bit of confusion around what cloud computing really is. In this session, I will fully explain the difference between an organization's datacenter and a private cloud as well as how these relate to the public cloud and where exactly a hybrid cloud comes into play. After this session, you will be armed to make the correct decisions for your organization (and your own personal future) on when and how you adopt cloud computing.

PRI 103 - Building your Private Cloud – Virtualizing with Microsoft Hyper-V

Dustin Smith, MVP - Slalom Consulting

Understanding the key elements of a private cloud are essential to architecting a rich private cloud environment. This session will explore the details of virtualizing tier 1 applications such as Exchange, SharePoint, Lync with Microsoft Hyper-V. Best practices and sizing components will be discussed to ensure that you are getting the most out of your private cloud.

PRI 104 - Get your Head out of the Clouds and Start Computing

Harold Wong - Microsoft

With all the media hype around cloud computing today, I'm sure there is also quite a bit of confusion around what cloud computing really is. In this session, I will fully explain the difference between an organization's datacenter and a private cloud as well as how these relate to the public cloud and where exactly a hybrid cloud comes into play. After this session, you will be armed to make the correct decisions for your organization (and your own personal future) on when and how you adopt cloud computing.

LAB 103 -  Office 365 in Action (Productivity in the Cloud) [session 1]

Andy Tremba & Dom Aguilar - Microsoft

Join us for this interactive Office 365 deep dive demo. The presenter will show you how you can use Office 365 to be productive anywhere using email, web conferencing, documents, and calendars. Attend this session to get a better understanding of what Office 365 can do and how it could benefit your organization.

LAB 104 - Office 365 in Action (Productivity in the Cloud) [session 2]

Andy Tremba & Dom Aguilar - Microsoft

Join us for this interactive Office 365 deep dive demo. The presenter will show you how you can use Office 365 to be productive anywhere using email, web conferencing, documents, and calendars. Attend this session to get a better understanding of what Office 365 can do and how it could benefit your organization.

LAB 105 - Tools for Assesing Office 365 Readiness an Intro to OAI-C

 Marcus Hass - Microsoft

This session will introduce Microsoft’s new tool to assess a customer’s alignment to the features and services offered Office 365. The tool can assess an organizations readiness to move to Office 365.  The session will also demonstrate how this tool is being used to advance the Office 365 product, improve migration and make deployment easier. This tool (named the Office 365 Alignment Index Calculator or OAI-C) is maintained by the Office 365 product and can be used to prepare organizations for an Office 365 deployment. By attending this session you will gain an understanding of how using this tool will result in a predictable and well planned Office 365 deployment.