On the 22nd of August i had the pleasure to attend this event organized by www.scug.no (System center user group norway) where the topic of the day was “Enterprise Client Management” held at Microsofts headoffice in Lysaker, Oslo. Which was free to attend , all you had to do was to sign up and get a ticket and show up at the event 😀
I traveled to Norway the day before the event and stayed at a friends place. The day of the event started out with me traveling to Lysaker in Oslo by train at around 07:15
I arrived around 8am at Microsoft and by 08:30 there was breakfast being served (sadly forgot to take pictures, it was still morning okay? ). At 09:00 the meeting started with Marius Skovli (www.scug.no founder) greeting people welcome and giving the general outline of the day.
The first MVP speaker was Jason Sandy‘s who talked about Maintenance and upkeep for SCCM site’s with the focus on SQL. Not just site server DB but also WSUS where one of the big things he mentioned was that before it has been a general rule that one shouldn’t touch the WSUS server configuration if you use it with ConfigMgr in the sense of declining updates but he emphasised that because of WSUS catalog being so huge as it is and containing updates that many times isn’t needed you can for example make a powershell script that declines all the updates that has the name “Beta” or maybe “office” if you aren’t using office software updates or what else it could be you know you can exclude. I will probably do a blog post on a script like that in the near future. He also talked a bit about pre-creating the databases and setting size limit on them.
One of the topics was to avoid using the built in backup and Rebuild Indexes in ConfigMgr and instead using SQL Server to do those tasks instead.
After a short break it was MVP Greg Ramsey‘s time to enter the stage and the topic was “Using PowerShell in ConfigMgr” with the focus being on how to do things on the client side with for example Compliance settings, detection methods and Remediation which is a funny coincidence because i actually wrote a blog post on that last week that’s coming out on the 29th of August but Greg wen’t in to more details on the different outputs that ConfigMgr works with and also troubleshooting the output. He also talked about one caveat that he also demonstrated where in you change the profile in powershell it can output a string directly when powerhsell launches with can mess up the detection method if the script is looking for a exit code of 0 or some specific string.
Uservoice please vote if you find this useful, i know i certainly think it is.
One of Greg’s Scripts. Discovery for files in client Cache folder
The time is now 11:15 and its lunch time, and we get served all sorts of baguette’s which was very needed at least for me because i had skipped the breakfast earlier. At 12 it was time for one of the sponsors who made this event possible to talk about their product. The company was Flexera (previously Secunia) which i personally never had heard about before but i have to say i was impressed by their product and their representative William Melby. The product he talked about was Software updates in SCCM but from 3rd parties like Java,Chrome or what ever 3rd party application the customer is using and how they help make sure that the latest patches for that application is secure and also ready to be deployed in your ConfigMgr environment with the help of their application that’s intergrated with ConfigMgr and Software updates. Very interesting i have to say and definitely something to take closer look on if you are managing 3rd party updates via Software updates and WSUS in ConfigMgr and want to stay secure and up to date with the latest patches.
After that another break it was last but not least Marius Skovli‘s turn to enter the stage and talk about “Control the uncontrollable with ConfigMgr and Intune” but before he started off there was a contest where Jason and Greg asked one question each to the audience and the person with the correct answer won a book by Kent Agerlund and Peter Daalmans “Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite: Planning and Implementation“. sadly i wasn’t one of the lucky winners but congrats to the ones who was 😀
For me personally i have very limited experience with EMS so i will definitely order a copy of Kent’s and Peter’s book and Marius talk gave me a good understanding on how things work. When Marius talk was done there was a few minutes for questions to Jason and Greg and oh i almost for got the other sponsor Nutanix who gave away a BB-8 ! I would have loved to bring a BB-8 with me on the train home but i wasn’t the lucky winner of that magnificent robot sadly.
There was a bunch more stuff happening and talked about that day then i can cover in a single blog post but i it was a truly amazing event, i had a blast! I learned a lot and just being in a room with so many talented people gives at least me so much motivation to learn more because there’s always something new to learn and i can only speak for my self but that is what’s drives me, the urge to learn more and more! It was a amazing event put together by Scug.no and i will definitely come back for future events.
Thanks again to Jason, Greg, Marius and all the sponsors and other people involved who made this event happen!
For more pictures go to Scug.no’s Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/scugnorway/?fref=ts
Until next time, Cheers Timmy
2 comments