[BarryStiefel]

Originally Posted by northlandboy

Someone from Check Point that I can berate about their poor support?

I'm negotiating with Check Point technical support to have people on hand to provide face-to-face technical support and also to have a presentation giving the behind-the-scenes tour of their whole technical support operation.

Originally Posted by northlandboy

Someone from Check Point that can explain their incredibly complex licensing, and why the licensing seems to change in advance of the technology - e.g. why do I need to apply a hotfix to R62/R60 HFA 04 to get a license working?

One of our breakout sessions is going to purely on licensing, with a Check Point employee going through all the details.

Originally Posted by northlandboy

Someone who can explain the whole UTM/Power/Whatever new name we come up with today thing to me again, because I still don't get it?

I'm confused on all this also. We're working on getting someone from Check Point to answer these bigger picture questions and provide a road map for products (and their names) going forward.

Originally Posted by northlandboy

Slightly more seriously, random thoughts off the top of my head:
<nb haven't fully read all the CPCON details, you may have covered some of these>

* Someone from Check Point to talk about product direction - not just their new products they want us to buy, but the core products that most people are using, and how they see those progressing. I'm thinking about stuff like audit trails - things have improved with rev. control & audit logs, but there is still a need for things like FireMon to do something that many sites now require as a minimum for compliance purposes.

* Related to that, perhaps someone from the SPLAT team to talk about future directions there. Greater integration with Smart Clients for SPLAT configuration? HW support, installation of third party HW monitoring tools, etc...(e.g. HP's system agents)

* Competitors? Hmmm...maybe not - but someone with experience across a broad range of platforms could be interesting, to talk about deployment/mgmt scenarios in mixed environments.

This would be interesting. How about a breakout session on integrating Check Point products into a mixed infrastructure? Anybody want to lead this?

Originally Posted by northlandboy

* Technical people from _very_ large deployments, talking about how they manage their environments. Stuff like change management, auditing, etc. How they schedule changes - some places do anything, any time, others limit numbers of changes, to certain times - and how they deal with the fallout from that.

Can you provide me with contact information for someone who could present this?

Originally Posted by northlandboy

* Audit/Compliance/Forensics stuff can be interesting

* Career progression for the FW-1 admin?

We're going to have a General Session which is going to be either an open discussion or a panel discussion specifically about this.

Originally Posted by northlandboy

* Nokia/Nortel/Crossbeam to talk about their direction, and how they intend to differentiate themselves from SPLAT

I agree SPLAT is a serious competitor here. Nokia/Nortel/Crossbeam are being invited to give technical presentations on their products.

Originally Posted by northlandboy

CPCON looks pretty interesting. Like the idea of the mentor thing - I could have used that a few years ago. I'll probably be in Iran or Turkmenistan in May though. Probably have a beard too, although not a grey one...

Also good to see you've got Phoneboy along, even if he doesn't do so much CP stuff these days - VoIP is the future anyway.

Hope it works out well, and attracts enough attention to keep it going - maybe one day I'll be in regular employment again, and I'll be able to convince the boss to send me along...;-)

I wish you could make it. You're a valued contributor here.

Barry