BCS Presentation 16th October - Steve Lamb Microsoft

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This evening I had the pleasure to attend my local BCS monthly talk, this months entitled "Microsoft on Security: What interesting security features are in Microsoft's Windows Vista and Server 2008's and what's next for Microsoft security"

More details here
http://sy.bcs.org/index.php?c=events&p=event&r=20081016

Now to me firstly for those who like this sort of thing, the BCS have a series of lectures (this may vary depending on location), open to the public, the good thing is you dont have to be a member to attend, but I think the membership goes towards making interesting lectures like tonights possible.

About the speaker, Mr Steve Lamb, around a year ago I attended my first BCS lecture, with another MS employee, talking about Vista, and to be honest he took some stick, but credit where credit was due he took it on board and explained the reasoning behind most of why things were in Vista, and so on.

Following on Mr Lamb was a nice chap who knew his stuff and communicated it well.

I think that Microsofts staff are up there with the best, I know they get a lot of stick so I can imagine they are sometimes tarred with a bad brush because of who they work for (unfairly), but my experience has been positive with them.

For interested people his blog is here http://blogs.technet.com/steve_lamb/, tonight he talked about Server 2008, and Vista and the security options, and some features that were well and not so well used, such as UAC, bit locker, and NAP (network access protection), and a bit about IPSEC.

The one thing I came away with tonight, as a lot of this i covered in studies, is the importance of engaging your users and giving them a vested interested in being secure.

For example, nail down your laptops so that users are running majorly on a (l)user account, however if they will be working offsite, and will be needing to add some hardware for example, give them a second accound to do so, teach them how to use the "run as" command, this will save you time and support heartache, and also give the user the best experience possible, and keep them productive.

The tools are there, but as he said for example weak passwords can ruin the most secure system, his suggestion that he used a easily remembered phrase rather than something along the lines of th1spwdsucks (my example there not his).

Of course this is all known knowledge for those who study, and probably implement, but i think these lectures get you thinking and more importantly get you out with like minded people.

As i said, tonight my main feeling was the reaffirmation that we are in this business, not for the technology, but to keep people productive, and a lot of people forget that.

 

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Steve is a top man, and I have learned a lot from him over the years, as well as getting to know him personally since we both connected on Twitter
did he present from his Macbook Air?

For a long time Steve was a MS Pro evangelist, (I think he is now in PR, not that a Pro Evangelist is far from PR anyway) and was tasked with helping people get the most out of the technology that many of them already had!
How many companies don't use half the features he talked about last night? despite having it built in to the OS they already own
How many companies spend countless $ and £ on kit to do similar if not identical tasks?

The problem isn't just with the corporations, its with the staff they hire, get a dumb MCSE brain dumper on board and they wont know squat when it comes to half the features they were not tested on, and passing the buck to external contractors covers their ass

Props to Steve, if you ever speak to him personally tell him @ryancoates says hello

 

Funnily enough just about the first thing he said was that he was using a Mac, but he had vista running on it.

 

he sure does, its one of those trade offs he talks about
he buys his own laptop and gets the convenience of it being his, getting what he wants and needs
but by joining it to the domain the company have control of it, mandate software requirements etc

he's required to have Vista on there as it's corporate policy

My mac runs Server 2008 w/ Hyper-V

 

I think I've seen him present at MS Reading at a Technet or MS Partner seminar.

I can honestly say I'm always impressed when I go to their HQ. The staff seem genuinely to enjoy working for MS and always have a laugh when things don't go quite as planned in demos. Makes them (MS) seem a lot more human.

For those who've never been to anything you can check up on what's available at the events site here.

I thought when I saw you were going to the BCS evening it would be good Kev, I'll have to see if my local lot can get him down too.