Here’s a great story in this month’s Washington Technology magazine demonstrating how Quest Policy Authority for Unified Communications provides policy enforcement, compliance and security in both public and private sector organizations around the globe.

http://washingtontechnology.com/articles/2009/05/11/tech-trends-peer-to-peer.aspx

As usual, Quest Software will be all over Tech-Ed next week. A few of our experts will be speaking at the show … here’s a quick summary … come join us and make sure you come up and chat afterwards! 

Breakout Sessions:

• TUESDAY DAT307 Considerations for Large-Scale SharePoint Deployments on Microsoft SQL Server. Paul Learning, Joel Oleson. Tue 5/12 1:00-2:15 p.m. Room 151
• WEDNESDAY ISB205 Panel Discussion: Making Unified Communications Work for Your Organization. Bob Maher, David Sengupta, Dean Gillan, Doyle Friskney. Wed 5/13 10:15-11:30 a.m. Room 406
• THURSDAY UNC310 Migration to Microsoft Online Services from Exchange and Non-Microsoft Platforms. Erik Ashby, Keith Ridings. Thu 5/14 4:30-5:45 p.m. Room 403B
• FRIDAY DTL404 Case Study: Migrating Existing Client Applications to Windows Azure. Dmitry Sotnikov. Fri 5/15 2:45-4 p.m. Room 515B

Birds of a Feather Sessions:

• TUESDAY BOF08 Going to the Cloud: Are we Crazy? Dmitry Sotnikov. Tue 5/12 4:30-5:45 p.m. Room 501A
• THURSDAY BOF55 Developing on Windows Azure: Stories from the Trenches. Dmitry Sotnikov. Thu 5/14 6:45-7:45 p.m. Room 502A

Have a great conference, and come join us on the show floor … we have some exciting announcements coming out this year!  See you in Los Angeles!

There has been a fair bit of publicity recently about a leak of classified data concerning Marine One, the presidential helicopter President Barack Obama travels in.

According to reports, a peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing application named LimeWire installed on a defense contractor’s computer in Bethesda, MD permitted access to files containing confidential information belonging to government agencies to the public. These files were subsequently found on a file server in Iran, and included blueprints and the avionics package for Marine One.

Had the Defense contractor been using Quest’s Policy Authority for Unified Communications - Compliance Edition, it would have been able to prevent this leak.

Unlike some solutions on the market posing as Data Leak Protection (DLP) solutions that only scan a handful of well-known ports like 80, 25 and 443, Policy Authority - Compliance Edition includes technologies which scan all 65536 ports for leakage of any data, on any port, using any protocol. Policy Authority is available in software form or as a hardened appliance.

In addition to P2P security and compliance, Policy Authority also provides security and compliance for public instant messaging (IM) solutions (e.g., MSN, Yahoo, AOL AIM, etc.), enterprise IM solutions (Office Communications Server, SameTime, Jabber), financial IM solutions (e.g., Reuters, Bloomberg, Pivot) … along with archiving for all of these and Blackberry PIN-to-PIN messages.

Let’s hope that this is the last leak of its kind and that Federal Agencies make a point of reviewing security and compliance around P2P, and implement solutions to protect against inadvertent or willful leaks of this nature.

Today was another great day at TEC09.

• Started out with a Keynote by Microsoft’s David Espinoza, who talked about how Microsoft develops Exchange Server and the elite Technology Adopion Program (TAP). David also talked about Exchange Labs and Exchange Online.  Much of what David presented has never been presented outside of Microsoft, which made for some interesting discussion!
• This was followed by an outstanding session on electronic discovery (e-discovery) by Quest Software’s Keri Farrell. With many years of IT background at Microsoft PSS (Exchange Database Recovery team), Iron Mountain, Boston Scientific and Safety 1st. Keri is an internationally-renowned expert in the intersection between legal and IT who has spoken at LegalTech and other similar conferences … we had some great discussion!
• J. Peter Bruzesse then led a packed session on Designing a Bulletproof Exchange 2007 Infrastructure, followed by another one of Brett Shirley’s Level 400 sessions on “What’s New” in the Exchange 2007 Extensible Storage Engine (ESE) and Information Store (IS). If you haven’t stumbled across it yet, Brett runs a blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/brettsh/default.aspx.
• The last session of the day was a deep dive by Michael B. Smith on Exchange 2007 VSS Backups with WIndows Server 2008.
• We wrapped up the day with a very lively and engaging Birds of a Feather session in which we covered topics ranging from migrations of all shapes and sizes, e-mail productivity, legal discovery, archiving, IT in a down economy, and more!

Looking forward to an action-packed final Day 3 of TEC tomorrow! It’s been exciting seeing TEC shape up as possibly the most deep technical Exchange conference on the ‘conference circuit’ … nothing but hard core technology for the experts of the Exchange world … Woot!

As many of you know, Quest Software’s acquisition of NetPro brought with it the industry-leading Directory Experts Conference (DEC), which has now been renamed The Experts Conference (TEC).  TEC kicked off yesterday in Las Vegas, and we’ve just completed Day 1. This is our first year with an Exchange Conference as a part of this event. If you’re familiar with past DEC events, you’ll know that this is one of the most hard-core conferences available, with pretty close to zero marketing content, and most sessions at either a Level 300 or Level 400 (= deep technical).

From an Exchange perspective, we had some great deep technical sessions today. In many ways, this felt like a small Microsoft Exchange Conference (MEC). Highlights included:

• Konstantin Ryvkin (Microsoft IT) spoke at great length in his keynote about architecting and running Microsoft’s global Exchange infrastructure, which also forms the foundation of Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite’s Exchange Online
• Ilse Van Criekinge (Global Knowledge, Belgium) gave a great session on Exchange 2007 Client Access Server (CAS) technologies.
• Brett Shirley (Microsoft) gave one of the most technically advanced presentations I’ve ever sat through on Exchange (and I’ve been working with Exchange since Exchange 4.0 beta!) in a level 400 session on the Extensible Storage Engine (ESE) … covering content that has never before been shared outside of Microsoft!
• Jonathan Smith (Ensynch) gave an outstanding presentation on Geoclustering with Exchange 2007 and Windows Server 2008. You never would have guessed that this was Jon’s first time speaking at an event like this (great job!) … his expertise came across clearly, and the session spawned some great interaction!
• J. Peter Bruzzesse (ClipTraining) provide a thorough presentation on the migration path from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007.

Looking forward to a great Day 2 tomorrow!  For those of you who couldn’t make it to TEC this year, you’ll be able to follow us on Twitter using hashtag #TEC09.  And you’re also welcome to join the TEC Facebook group, as well. Tuesday starts off with a keynote by Microsoft’s David Espinoza … should be great!

This blog is written by Quest Software’s Unified Communications team. Over the weeks and months to come we’ll be publishing posts by technical experts throughout Quest - product managers, systems consultants, technical writers, developers, quality and product support engineers - who work with Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS), Lotus Notes, IBM SameTime, and other messaging & collaboration solutions. Our focus will be on migration, management, compliance, security and e-discovery topics.

We’re excited about this new forum and hope you’ll find it a valuable resource. If you do, spread the word!  And if you twitter, use hashtag #QuestUC. You get it! ;) Woot!

Welcome on board!

David Sengupta
Director, Unified Communications