Today MMS begins… "State of the Union" is THE session, and MMS doesn’t start until this session…
My schedule for Tuesday was the following:
- 08:30 – 10:00 Opening Keynote
- 10:15 – 11.30 System Center Configuration Manager: "State of the Union"
- 11:45 – 13:00 How Microsoft IT Uses OSD for Deploying Windows 7
- 14:15 – 15:30 Easing the pain: Techniques for managing drivers with SCCM and MDT
- 16:00 – 17:15 Configuration Manager Hardware Inventory Customization
- 17:30 – 19:00 Configuration Manager MVP Reception
- 19:00 – 21:00 The myITforum.com Party
Opening Keynote
The opening keynote was like always a great "show" including a few announcements. The Keynote was presented by Corporate Vice President Bob Kelly and he talked a lot about Datacenter Management and "Cloud Computing". Something that we will hear a lot about in the coming years. He also talked about the importance of Dynamic IT, something Microsoft has talked about for last 4 or 5 years.
With Windows Server 2008 R2 almost being ready to be released, Microsoft Hyper-V 2.0 and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 is something everyone talks about. Edwin showed some really cool demos on the integration between Hyper-V, SCVMM and SCOM 2007 R2. There is no doubt that Microsoft will win some key customers that uses VMware today, with these upcoming releases.
System Center Configuration Manager: "State of the Union"
Bill and Josh on stage together is just awesome. Nothing at MMS beats this session…
One of the main reasons many people wants to see this session every year, is that we always get a sneak peak on what will happen in v.next and what great features they plan to add. This year was no exception.
They showed a great live demo on real code of ConfigMgr v.next. I don’t want to go through all the new features in this post, but I’ll promise to blog about most of the features when I get back to Europe.
The most important information right now, that might help you prepare for this upcoming release is the system requirements. All site roles requires 64-bit Windows. The only exception is the Standard DP that will run on Windows Server 2003 32-bit as well.
How Microsoft IT Uses OSD for Deploying Windows 7
Windows 7 is everywhere, and many of our customers is already asking about when we expect that they’ll be able to deploy Windows 7 using ConfigMgr, so I went to this session to hear something about what Microsoft IT has learned during the beta.
This session was awesome… The main speaker was Chris Adams, and I’ve never heard this guy do a talk before. He is truly a great speaker… This session is one of the best sessions I’ve ever seen (I’m not sure it’ll be as fun, if you could only hear him. Watching him on stage was amazing).
Microsoft’s users required significant enhancement of the OSD end-user interface, driver management, and USMT. These tools and "add-ons" was developed for internal use only, but they will all be shared on his blog within a week or so… Check it out at http://blogs.technet.com/osd.
Easing the pain: Techniques for managing drivers with SCCM and MDT
Managing drivers is always a pain, and there’s no perfect solution today to this problem. Michael Niehaus walked through different ways of managing drivers in WDS, MDT and ConfigMgr. As many of you already know I’m a "control freak", so this session will not change the way I manage drivers, but he showed some pretty cool PowerShell stuff that gave me some ideas to work with (yet another reason to get started with PowerShell J).
Configuration Manager Hardware Inventory Customization
My last session today was about hardware inventory customization. This session was presented by a friend and fellow MVP Sherry Kissinger. This was Sherry’s first talk a MMS, and she did a great job. She showed how to customize the information reported ConfigMgr clients to increase the scalability and relevance of data reported by Hardware Inventory. Most of this session was live demo, and she showed how to modify the files used to enable or disable inventory items step by step. Great Session!
If you want to read more about Sherry’s inventory optimization, don’t forget to visit her blog:
http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/skissinger/
Configuration Manager MVP Reception
It’s not easy to get time to talk to everyone during the conference, so the ConfigMgr MVP Reception was a great opportunity to get to talk to some of the other MVP’s and the product team.
The myITforum Party
I was really looking forward to this party, but I got hit by jetlag, so unfortunately I had to leave early.
I was completely wasted…
