Ahoey out there!
What a great first day at MMS2014!!! First of all: I had no bad or uninteresting Session the whole first day!!! – how wonderful is that?!
The Sessions:
Well I decided to take part to the sessions hourly and it was not the worst decission in retrospect. Even though the speakers would blame me eventually….
This decision brought me to the total number of 10 awesome Sessions for the day!
In a nutshell: here a my personal highlights of the day:
One of my hightlights for the day was Session of called: “Configmgr – State of the Union” apparently a traditional MMS session where Kim Oppalfens & Kent Agerlund told us interinsting news about what happened in the world of SCCM and MMS in the past year. Really, really intersting news but the big thing was a tool called CASUM, which was released by Kent Agerlund within the Session. It’s a tool that helps you automating your Windows Updates very easy. In addtion to that you will find recommanded blogs for Configuration Manager in the slides.
Another awesome session was called “Compliance Settings – The Dark Art of Client Management” hold by Sherry Kissinger & Kent Agerlund where Sherry used the “non-compliant ” function for Software inventory. Both of them explained us their undestanding of compliant settings and different areas of application.
“Get Started with Configuration Manager and PowerShell” unsurprisingly was a super session too. A good starter for anybody who wants to start using PowerShell to administrate ConfigMgr. Good news for everyone who has missed the session: the PowerShell commands are within the notes field of every slide.
I’ve visited two PowerShell “starter” sessions too. “PowerShell – Fine, I’m finally ready to learn what PowerShell is!” and “Practical PowerShell Tips ‘n Tricks” both sessions were quite awesome. A very good one was the explanation of PowerShell on the understandable example of beer by Trevor Sullivan. He is going to do a webinar in mid-december on building a lab in Azure with windows PowerShell. Don’t miss that one.
A real jewel in the sessionboard from my point of view was one of the afternoon sessions called: “Non-trivial Configuration Manager 2012 Sites and Hierarchie” where Wally Mead & Jason Sandys provided us with very (!!) helpful information about building complicated and non-trivial ConfigMgr site and hierarchies. The session included information and architecture tricks for boundaries, boundary groups, secondary sites, remote site systems, cross-forest support, and how to support managed systems within a DMZ or any type of zone where network traffic is strictly controlled.
Make sure you get these slides!!!
Things you eventually know – well I didn’t:
– Wally Mead has left Microsoft beacause he figured out that Windows 10 will come without notepad
– swimming shorts, a Hawaiian Shirt, a straw hat and slippers are the recommanded outfit for a session
– the main organizer of this event and popular MVP for Client Management is NOT named Brian Mason his actual name is Brain Mason instead.
– the “Coretech Automated Software Update Management–CASUM” Tool is working even tough your company logo is a cat
– if Kaido Järvemets explains you something in PowerShell with the words: “Thats very easy” – you shouldn’t trust him 🙂
– Kent Agerlund even has a tool for doing blogpost
Seariously guys this event is community to the max, like Peter Daalmans said. And how cool is it that David James who played an important role in the development of SMS for years was at the event too?!
I’m looking forward to the second day!
*Captain