ResNet Symposium 2009

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Professional Development Seminars

The Professional Development Seminars (PDS) take place prior to the regular program schedule and are an excellent way to expand your mind at the annual ResNet Symposium. You can register for the PDS when you register for the conference.

ITIL Foundations: by Eric Goodoien, New Horizons

Location: Miller Center, Cost: $65

This ITIL v3 Service Management Awareness overview provides a general introduction to IT Service Management, focusing on the lifecycle of services-birth to retirement-broken into five key phases. The phase components, Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operations and Continual Service Improvement, are introduced and discussed within the best practice framework:

Overview of a Lifecycle Approach to IT Service Management

• Introduction to IT Service Management
• Key ITIL v3 Concepts
• ITIL Service Management integration: Business Services; IT Services; IT Functions
• Value of Service

Lifecycle: Five Phases

• Service Strategy: Working with the business to plan appropriately for both long and short term service needs
• Service Design: Planning and architecting services that fall within the business's strategy
• Service Transition: Moving planned business initiatives to live status; retiring old services no longer of value to the business; improving services to keep the business at or above required competitive levels
• Service Operation: Managing the services currently utilized by the business
• Continual Service Improvement: Implemented as part of every process

Teaching Customer Service Skills: by Brad Grabham, St. Cloud State University

Location: Miller Center, Cost: $30

Can your student workers diagnose a computer in seconds, but lack a little bedside manner? Are boring customer service videos just not doing the trick anymore? Do you wonder how to teach customer service in a way that will excite and motivate them? In this session you will gain the tools necessary to have a fun and productive customer service session. Learn how to mix lecture with games and activities that will reinforce what they've learned and get them thinking.

Project Management Overview: by Eric Goodoien, New Horizons

Location: Miller Center, Cost: $65

Project Management skills are in high demand for almost every professional role. This overview is a primer on the basics of Project Management. Attendees will learn how to use Project Management techniques to plan, organize, control, document and close out their projects successfully and with minimum risk.

Project Management: Topic Focuses

• The Project Life Cycle
• Setting Up for Success
• Risk Management
• Project Plans
• The Project Schedule
• The Project Budget
• Project Close-Out

Overall this session address a Project Manager’s role from beginning to end of a project.

Being the Boss, it is Not a 4-Letter Word: by Karen McRitchie, Grinnell College

Location: Miller Center, Cost: $50

So, is it 7 habits, 4 steps, a 6 step model, 10 lenses, or 3 easy payments to being a great manager? It is never that easy! You may not realize that micromanaging a Generation X staff member doesn't work well or you may empower your staff to the point that you undermanage them. When all is said and done, someone still needs to be the boss! You are the guide, mentor, facilitator, therapist, creative director, and maybe even the entire cheerleading squad for your team. In the end, however, you are the one accountable for the daily operations and success of projects.

Being a boss can be challenging. There is the "big talk" that you may have with staff or figuring out if a team member "meets expectations." Do you have productive meetings? Are you holding your team members accountable? Do you just want everyone to like you and get along? There are the times when you have to be a leader and other times sit back and see what your team can do—do you know the difference? Many people get to be a boss, yet have had no training or practice, others think they don't need training and fall into one of the many stereotypes of the bad boss. One of the main reasons for employee turnover is a bad relationship with their boss. Let's spend some time exploring skills and tools for being a great boss, whether you are new to the role or need to energize your boss skills.

Windows Technical Fundamentals for Understanding and Cleaning Malware: by Brandon Enright, UCSD

Location: Miller Center

Note: This is a two part PDS Session, the first half in the morning, and the second half in the afternoon. Attendance at the second half is not required. Each half costs $50.

Face it, even on a good day Microsoft Windows is complicated.  Add to this complication a sophisticated rootkit and even the best of us rapidly get lost.  Malware often changes Windows in unrecommended, unsupported, and downright unexpected ways.  Whether you remove malware by hand or have to fix up Windows after some tool have removed the infection, understanding what is broken and how everything fits together is half the battle.

This PDS will tackle the malware problem in two parts.  First, we will build up a deeper understanding of how Windows works including:

• Understanding services and drivers and the difference between them
• The difference between kernel mode and usermode and the role of each
• Just what svchost.exe, winlogon.exe, services.exe, etc are and what they do
• Processes, threads, remote threads, libraries, etc
• Kernel/W32 API/inline hooks and jumps used by rootkits

Once we've built up the fundamentals needed to understand how malware interacts with Windows we'll look at ways of identifying, removing, and fixing up after malware.  This will include:

• Using Windows permissions against malware
• Handling malware that abuses the Windows "autorun" feature to spread on USB flash drives
• Identifying and removing most rootkits
• Fixing up Windows services after modification from malware
• Fixing the most common breakage done by malware
• Identifying when to give up/cut losses and just reinstall Windows

This PDS is mostly hands-on and will be working in a VMWare environment.  A lot of the information covered will be registry intensive and will make heavy use of Sysinternals tools like Process Explorer, Autoruns, etc.