I’d mentioned a couple of weeks ago that this year’s Directory Experts Conference was the biggest and most successful yet. Evidently that meant something to NetPro and its partners (especially Microsoft) as last week NetPro announced that – after a lapse of three years – DEC was returning to Europe. But you’ll have to plan quickly as it’s coming up in just a few short months. DEC Europe 2007 will be held Sept. 24–26, 2007, at the Sheraton Brussels Hotel in Brussels, Belgium.

Many of the same sessions and topics so recently covered in Las Vegas will again be on offer in Brussels, including:

* Directory services, with specific focus on leveraging and managing Active Directory.
* Identity lifecycle management, including all aspects of ILM, from user provisioning to cross-platform management.
* Federated identity, highlighting Active Directory Federation Services.
* Information protection, with specific emphasis on Windows Rights Management Services.

All under the general theme “Identity and Access in the Windows Server 2008 Era.”

NetPro CTO Gil Kirkpatrick will lead three live-demo afternoon working sessions on Longhorn Active Directory, designed to provide scenario-based instruction on AD in Windows Server 2008. The demos will cover everything from performing a fresh install and forest upgrade to managing Active Directory on Server Core and deploying and operating Read Only DCs. Assisting Kirkpatrick will be a team of Microsoft Directory Services Most Valuable Professionals (MVP), including industry notables Guido Grillenmeier, Jorge de Almeida Pinto, and Ulf B. Simon-Weidner.

The full agenda is now online so check it out, and get your registration in (there is an “early bird” discount through the end of June). I’m sure a number of you are headed to Tech-ED next week, and that will be an excellent venue for learning about Windows Server 2008, but DEC is much more highly focused; the speakers are much more approachable and the opportunity for hands-on experience is much greater.

I cannot reiterate enough that Windows Server 2008 will be the most important release of a server operating system from Microsoft since NT 3.5. The sooner you know about it, the more you know about it, the better off you will be. Plus, convincing your bean counters that a trip to Brussels is educational is got to be a lot easier than trying to claim Las Vegas as a “learning experience”!