Laura Chappell’s Fave Network Forensic Tools

Last day at Tech*Ed and Laura Chappell is presenting her favorite products – most (obviously) focused on network forensics. The ones I especially liked are the multifunction NetScan Pro Tools, KeyGhost and – if you have kids (or are a kid at heart) the SumoBot Competition Robot Set: http://www.wiresharktraining.com/tools.html

Getting great interview at Tech*Ed

As part of a podcast series our MVP Lead team is doing, I’m interviewing MVPs who are at the IT Pro week of Tech*Ed. So far, Ross Pfaff (Office System), Toni Savage (Microsoft Dynamics SL) and today … Arvin Meyer (Microsoft Access). Had great conversation with the always entertaining Arvin. When I get back to Seattle, I post the text of the interviews on my blog with a link to the audio!

Marcus Murray Tech*Ed session on hacking

As a C/C++/Assembler programmer, I’ve always been interested in security and exploits. Working now at Microsoft, I had the opportunity to work closely with the Security team in getting the Windows SDK to pass various security measures in order to ship. During this time, I met security guru Michael Howard, read his book and learned much from those experiences.

I just completed watching a session that – after 20+ years of attending such conferences and sessions – was the most impressive session I’ve seen. Called “A  Hackers Diary: How I Can Hack Your Vulnerable Services and How You Can Stop Me” and given by Marcus Murrary, the session had great live demos, was perfectly and covered a complex topic in a very short period of time. I’ll definitely be reading much more of Marcus’ work and be checking out many of the tools he discussed. Look for some articles from me on this topic as this session really excited me about getting back into this passion…

Interviewing MVPs at TechEd

Fellow MVP Lead Brian Boston started an initiative to interview MVPs and other influencers and post them as podcasts. Since I’m at Tech*Ed, I volunteered to interview a couple of my MVPs.

Over the first two days, I’ve talked to two MVPs:

* Ross Pfaff – An Office System MVP, Ross has been an MVP since 1994 (way before I joined MSFT) and has some great anecdotes to share

* Toni Savage – A Dynamics SL (previously Solomon) MVP, Toni is a joy to talk and also has some great stories to share.

Over the next day or two, I’ll post a verbatim of our chats as well as links to the podcasts.

PS: If you are at Tech*Ed and would like to be a part of this, email me at tom.archer@microsoft.com and we can talk!!

Dumping Twitter for a While

I’m changing my online communications strategy for a while. The combination of Twitter’s poor performance/reliability, less than stellar adoption and lack of options/features has led me to believe that Twitter might not be the best way to share my opinions and experience regarding the MVP Program, MVPs and “community” in general. Therefore, I’m going to go back to blogging more consistently to communicate that information.