Some of you have heard (or seen) that we've renamed DEC to The Expert's Conference, or TEC. Why? Well there are several reasons:
1. DEC is the acronym for the Directory Experts Conference. But DEC isn'just about directories, and hasn't been for several years. It includes ADFS, RMS, ILM, etc., etc.
2. We are also producing an Exchange expert's conference, along the same lines as DEC. But EEC and GEEC (for the Great Exchange Experts Conference) aren't great acronyms. OK, truthfully, I like them. Christine on the other hand just threw the back of her hand to her forehead and sighed dramtically. I've known Christine long enough to understand the non-verbal signal for "That ain't happening."
3. "The Experts Conference" has a good acronym: TEC. Sounds sort of, oh I don't know, technical. At least it does to a marketing person. Somtimes you have to go along to get along, know what I mean?
4. I got tired of confusing Wook. "Do you mean DEC my former company? Or DEC the conference?"
So we now have TEC for Directory and Identity, formerly known as DEC, and TEC for Exchange, formerly not known as anything, because, well, it's new. Make sense? No? Then start reading at the beginnig of the post again until you get it.
TEC/Directory and Identity and TEC/Exchange are separate conferences, but they will be colocated in 2009. TEC 2009 is scheduled for March 22-25 at the Green Valley Ranch Resort in Las Vegas (or Henderson for people with finicky travel policies) Nevada. So everyone who spent the entire year griping about Chicago in 2008, you can just shut the he** up 
. We will also be hosting TEC Europe September 14-16 in Berlin (Germany, not North Dakota).
What are we going to cover? For AD, we'll focus more on real-world WS 2008 AD deployment and operational topics, what's coming in AD for Windows 7, plus the usual how-does-it-really-work type sessions. There will be lots of coverage for ILM '2' and ADFS '2' because both products will be just about ready to RTM. We will continue our coverage of RMS (which seems to be picking up a lot traction this year), and AD/LDS and GPO management will figure prominently as well. There will be 4 pre-conference hands-on workshops on Sunday, too.
For Exchange, the bulk of the sessions will be related to Exchange 2007, including Powershell, unified communications, architecting for performance and scalability, a MAPI deep-dive, and troubleshooting. We might be able to include some E14 content as well, but that will depend on the product team. We are planning on two pre-con hands-on workshops on Sunday as well.
The main TEC website is at http://www.tec2009.com, and the call for papers is now open for both conferences. Please get your session proposals in soon, because registration for the conferences goes live August 25, and I'd like to have the agendas pretty well firmed up by then.
If you have any questions, drop me an email.
See you at TEC!