USENIX - Call for Participation - Large Scale System Administration of Windows NT Workshop

Large Scale System Administration of Windows NT

August 14-16, 1997, Sheraton Seattle Hotel, Seattle, Washington,

Co-located with the USENIX Windows NT Workshop
August 11-13, 1997

Sponsored by the USENIX Association and SAGE, a Special Technical Group within USENIX. The submission due dates for presentations and break-out proposals have passed, and the program committee is finalizing the agenda. Detailed information and registration materials will be available in late April. If you would like to receive a brochure, send email to conference@usenix.org or call (714) 588-8649.

IMPORTANT DATES

Deadlines for all submissions: March 1, 1997
Notification of acceptance: April 9, 1997
Registration material available: May , 1997
Camera-ready copy due: July 14, 1997

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Co-Chairs:
Xev Gittler, Lehman Brothers
Phil Scarr, Synopsys

Committee
Remy Evard, Argonne National Laboratory
Idajean Fisher, Pencom
Bernie O'Connor, SAS Institute
David Parter, University of Wisconsin
Ian Reddy, Simon Fraser University
John Schimmel , Silicon Graphics
Michal Simek, Hewlett-Packard
Mark Verber, Xerox PARC

Overview

This workshop is for system administrators designing or deploying solutions to manage Windows NT on a large scale (500+ systems).

The Workshop is a forum to:

Bring UNIX and NT system administrators together to discuss problems of scale in the NT environment
Establish a dialogue between System Administrators who are faced with growing NT environments
Address specific technical issues in managing large scale NT environments
Provide a framework for future conferences on NT system administration

The workshop program will include informal tutorials, works-in-progress (WIP) papers, demonstrations, and panels as well as more informal roundtables and breakout sessions. In addition, there will be birds-of-a-feather sessions (BoFs) each evening.

Conference attendance will be limited to 300 people. Each attendee must submit a WIP, tutorial, demo or panel proposal. If you would like to attend but are not submitting, you will be asked to submit a position paper at the time you register describing your current deployment of NT and what contributions you will make to the workshop.

A workshop digest with all submitted materials will be published and distributed to attendees. In addition, results of the sessions will be made available after the workshop, and will be used to plan future NT system administration conferences or NT tracks at the annual Systems Administration (LISA) Conference .

WHAT TO SUBMIT
Tutorials

Tutorials at the workshop will be informal learning sessions. Tutorial proposals should contain a detailed outline of the material to be covered and your qualifications to teach this topic. Tutorials should be focused upon one aspect of Windows NT administration and should be an in-depth review of the subject, focusing on practical usage. Examples of good topics might be Understanding Windows NT Networking and Printing from Windows NT.

Panel Discussions

If you have expertise in an area that would benefit from group discussion, please submit a proposal for a panel discussion. Proposals should include a brief outline of the panel topic, as well as a description of your qualifications to chair the the panel.

Demos

Demonstrations of the successful deployment of home-grown or commercial applications which provide enhanced management functionality to NT are welcome. Vendors who would like to demonstrate their products should be prepared to provide real-world examples and case studies of product successes and failures. Demonstration proposals should include any special AV equipment required to provide the demonstration.

Works-in-Progress (WIP)

These should be no more than five pages long and will not be subject to a peer review process. Acceptance will be based upon the general applicability of the problem and solution as well as their scalability.

Papers addressing the topics below are very timely. Papers addressing other aspects of managing a large Windows NT environment are equally welcome. Please include an explanation of why the problem you are addressing and its solution would interest the NT system administration community. It is understood that many submissions will be incomplete in terms of their results, but this format will provide participants with a view of the current state of NT system administration.

If you are considering a submission, please note the following common causes of rejection:

Paper is blatant marketing material for commercial product
Insufficient background on problem or solution so that the audience cannot follow
Excessive use of domain-specific buzzwords
Papers which take an explicitly negative stance on NT system administration (i.e. "There is no hope for NT, buy UN*X").
Too little consideration of how the system administration community could benefit from experiences; limited applicability.
Solutions which scale poorly or have only been tried in small (i.e. <100 systems) environments.

Possible Topics

Filesystem Integration: CIFS (Common Internet File System); SMB
The Registry
User Accounts
Email
Printer Integration
Shared NT Solutions: ICA; windd, winctr, ntrigue, citrix; RAS
Remote Access
Remote Administration
Management Integration/Politics (especially, managing change)
Software Distribution
Backups/Restore
Name Service Integration: DHCP; DNS
Security
PDA Integration: Pilot, Newton, HP, etc.
Mobile Laptop Integration
PC Politics: "home machine" vs. "machine at home" model, i.e. control issues

HOW TO SUBMIT

We are accepting workshop submissions electronically, via email. Submissions should be sent as both plain text (with no extra markup), and as Postscript (formatted for an 8.5 x 11 page).

A cover letter should be included with all submissions containing the following information:

Names and affiliations of all authors

Primary contact

Full postal address

Telephone number

Email address (very important)

Fax

Category (work in progress paper, tutorial, demo, panel)

Anticipated AV needs (used only for planning purposes)

Submissions should consist of a uuencoded, compressed tar file (compress or gzip), containing both the plain text and Postscript versions (filenames should be based on your last name, e.g. smith.txt and smith.ps). This should be mailed, along with the cover letter, to program chairs at: nt-sysadmin@usenix.org.

Receipt of submissions will be acknowledged by return email within one week. If an acknowledgement is not received, please contact the co-chairs.

Materials containing the full program, registration fees and forms, and hotel information will be available in May 1997. To receive the registration materials, please contact:

USENIX Conference Office

22672 Lambert Street, Suite 613

Lake Forest CA 92630

(714) 588-8649

Fax: (714) 588-9706

conference@usenix.org