It is my great honor to say that Tony Redmond, whose many books have been my primary resource for learning Exchange, has asked me to speak at the IT Connections conference in Las Vegas this September. I am both excited and more than a little bit nervous about speaking at this event, but I guess the only way to grow is to push yourself outside of your comfort zone.

Looking at the list of speakers for the Exchange section of this conference, I am humbled to be included. I’m sure the information presented by the other speakers is going to be top notch, so I’m going to have to bring my “A" game if I’m to have any hope of keeping up. I’m working hard on my sessions. Here is a quick rundown of my sessions, and what I’ll be covering.

Performance Counters You Never Knew and Why they are Important

You’ve seen the guidance for deploying Exchange 2010 and 2013 servers. In this session we’re going to take the next step with a data-driven approach to monitoring and tuning the performance of your Exchange servers. We’ll start with a quick recap of the deployment guidance, and then we’ll moving into post-deployment tasks you can undertake to ensure you’re getting the best performance from your Exchange servers.

After we cover deploying and tuning Exchange, we’ll dive deep on 25 performance counters that will give you a great over-all picture of the health of your Exchange deployment. With each performance counter we cover, we’ll also give you a clear threshold for operation so there won’t be any question about the health of your Exchange server.

If that’s not enough, we’ll show you where Exchange 2013 is already collecting the performance data for the counters we talked about and about 3,000 of their closest friends.  We’ve even put together a PowerShell script that will parse all this data into a convenient and easy to use format.

Identity and Authentication Management for Office 365

Microsoft is now a cloud first solutions provider. To ensure that Office 365 can be a viable platform for all their customers, Microsoft has built a dizzying array of options for Identity and Authentication management into Office 365. Lots of options mean that many different organizations of all shapes and sizes can use Office 365, but they also mean a whole lot of complexity to sort through. In this session, I’m going to clearly lay out all the options, and the pros and cons of each.

How many ADFS servers do I need? What do I do if my DirSync server goes down? How can I migration multiple forests into Office 365? All these questions, and many more, will be answered in a straight forward way from a consultant who has moved hundreds of thousands of mailboxes into Office 365  for all shapes and sizes of organizations.

What do you think? Any questions on the topics covered? Let me know at nathan@mcsmlab.com, there is still time and I am still refining these sessions. I look forward to seeing you in Las Vegas.