Session 1: Innovations in Identity Management

Stefan Brands (who’s also Dutch) took the stage and shared with us his story. He and some colleagues joined Microsoft due to the acquisition of Credentica (http://www.credentica.com/) last year. Credentica has developed and patented their so called U-Prove technology which is a new way of doing Identity management.
UProve will become/is a so called “minimal disclosure token”

I was expecting a story about the new Geneva platform, so this was a nice kind of surprise to me. Stefan took us through this UProve technology and explained a bunch of its features. I invite you all to read more about this technology at http://www.credentica.com/unique_features.html and watch the introduction video http://www.credentica.com/intro_video.html.

Some of the features Stefan highlighted are:

• Subset disclosure: Only send the requested claims from the token
• Unlinkability /untraceability
• Derived claims: only disclose a property of a claim (can be computed)
• Issuer driven revocation: ex. a credit card that became invalid. The token will be blacklisted.
• User driven revocation: ex. the token is lost
• Verifier driven revocation: something invisible in the token van indicate that the token is blacklisted
• Brokered disclosure: some sort of query can be send to a broker. the result will not contain the details itself; the result will just indicate that records have been found (with perhaps the record count)
• User signed transcript: a relying party can send a subset to another relying party as an audit transcript

It’s really interesting where this is going and I expect this to be integrated in all sorts of Microsoft product stacks like for example WCF.

Session 2: Navigating the New World of Business

Daniel Rasmus elaborated a bit more on the well known subject : New World of Work / Business.
His story was about the different generations passing on (like the babyboomers, generationX and right now the Millennials) and how these generations all have their own characteristics and requirements related to their profession.
Daniel writes about this subject on his blog, and you can also find more on this web site: http://www.listeningtothefuture.com/

He and Rob Salkowitz wrote a book called “Listening to the Future” in which they speak about methods of scenario planning to look at issues facing businesses over the next 10-12 years. The work force coming up will be of a whole different kind that most of the companies are currently ready for. So anticipating on this is a major thing!

Interesting stuff, I recommend reading this whitepaper he wrote about the New World of Work:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/1/2/012e8e6e-ff65-4b04-857c-1e2c991f57f4/NewWorldOfWork.pdf

Session 3: Building composite information worker solutions using the Microsoft Office System

Paul Stubbs talked about OBA’s:  Office Business Applications. He showed different kind of architectures to build these and also showed a tool called the OBA composer. This is a tool which allows a user to mashup his OBA sharepoint application, and then let the tool generate this app within sharepoint. Nice kind of way to abstract all sorts of sharepoint configuration details.

Session 4: Security

Steve Riley came along, and did a whole different kind of session. Without a powerpoint he did some sort of whiteboard session where everyone could ask questions and discuss all sorts of issues.
I really enjoyed this session. It is great to see someone speaking on a subject he knows a LOT about; and he did it in such a humorous manner that I think everybody was on the tip of his chair ( :) that’s a Dutch saying that means you’re listening very closely to the speaker, and he has grabbed your full attention).

So we a great laugh at this last session of the day. Afterwards, we went directly to the busses to visit the Newcastle Golf Club for a dinner and a spectacular view.

That latter wasn’t possible due to the fog that hung around the hill.. Pity, however the dinner and table talk were fine!