Jul 18, 2012
Six Podcast Reports from New Orleans IT Pro Conference
June 2012 – New Orleans – Jeff Middleton’s IT Pro Conference was a great success last week. Two days of panels and discussions on the theme “Trusted Identity: Faith in a Technology World” were very well received. About 150 attendees spent the time in a conversation that wound around through discussions of
– Trusted Advisor roles – Identity Theft – Social Media Privacy Breaches – Hosted Environments – Government Oversight – Unintended Electronic Disclosures – Branding Realities in a Business or Technology without Trust – Partnership and Service Provider Failures – Identity Federation (Facebook, Gmail, Passport, service aggregators) – Social Media
and more!
Naturally, I decided to catch up with some folks and get their impressions of the whole event. I started with Andy Goodman, a long-time community member and leader. Andy has been working for/with SBSMigration.com for almost a year now. He was instrumental in making this event happen – and introducing Jeff’s new brand – IT Pro Experts – ITProExperts.com. Here’s Andy:
Download the Interview with Andy Goodman (Time 1:11)
Next up, I talked to Ben Yarbrough from Calyptix Security (http://www.calyptix.com/). In the conference, and in this interview, Ben talks about how security devices have really become very different from one another. The feature sets are now quite amazing.
Download the Interview with Ben Yarbrough (Time 2:52)
One of the ever-present members of this community – and Jeff’s conference – is Jan Spring from eFolder (www.efolder.net). Jan is an absolute fireball and one of the great brand ambassadors in this community. She gave us a quick sound check.
Download the Interview with Jan Spring (Time 1:00)
One of my favorite people in the SMB space is Jessica DeVita. Jessica has been involved for awhile, but she has recently decided to crank up her participation and “voice” in the community. She is a Microsoft MVP, a speaker at the conference, and is one of the people watch in our space. We talked about the future of our community – and a lot more.
Download the Interview with Jessica DeVita (Time 5:23)
Another one of my favorite people is Mark Crall, now from Storage Craft (www.storagecraft.com) and a former MSP from North Carolina. He talks here about choosing vendors and creating relationships in the channel.
Download the Interview with Mark Crall (Time 2:12)
Finally, I talked to Mitch Garvis, who travels ALL the time. Based in Canada, it is always a pleasure to run into Mitch way down in the Southern United States. Mitch is a Microsoft MVP, a Virtual Partner Technology Advisor at Microsoft Canada, and his blog is at http://garvis.ca. Mitch gives us some great reasons to attend community events, and this conference in general.
Download the Interview with Mitch Garvis (Time 1:23)
My personal thoughts on this conference – and some ideas about
what you should be doing to educate your clients about modern
discussions of “Trust” and delegation of trust will be posted
separately in the “Oceanic” edition of the Freeday Friday podcasts.
As soon as I get around to it. 
Bottom Line: A great conference as usual. Great community. Great topic. Great discussions. And, as Mitch reminds us: They have beer.