Highlights from the US Army Symposium at Microsoft

I thought I would jot down some mental notes from a few of the sessions I saw today here at the U.S. Army Symposium at the Microsoft Conference Center:

Some of the highlights from Bob Muglia's keynote session:

• Not surprising to see significant discussion by Bob around virtualization supporting on-premises and cloud services workloads. "Applications themselves need to support these concepts. There's a lot of complexity in existing applications. There's a lot of work still to do here." - How true!
• Bob talked about his use of Microsoft Direct Access (part of Win7) while he is traveling. DA leverages IPSec, IPv6 and strong authentication to enable an end-user to access corporate resources without the use of a VPN. - Cool technology but is every data center Windows only?
• I twittered that I was surprised that I didn't hear Bob once mention "identity management" despite the fact that it was listed by LTG Sorenson (Army CIO) as a key priority (along with federation).

RADM Elizabethe Hight who is the Vice-Director of the Defense Information Systems Agency presented the "DISA Enterprise". Some interesting comments from her...

• Social networking is becoming more and more important as a communications mean between the armed forces and NGOs (non-goverment organizations) so they can share information. You can imagine that the NGOs all use Twitter, blogs and instant messaging yet our armed forces don't have that capability. I thought this was cool to see the embracing of social networking as a tool to help communicate with the outside world in times of crisis.
• Also interesting to see the launching of the military's source forge to support open source development within the services.
• Oh, and more comments about the importance of identity to the overall mission!

A very interesting set of presentations and a very different view on IT from our friends at the Army. I'm glad I was able to attend!

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