This was a long day, I managed to get into four sessions and spend some time at SMS Expert booth talking with Dave. If you have not seen the new version of ESD make sure you stop by and check it out, they have done some great things with it. I was not able to make it to the get together at the Marriott, I was tired and had not eaten since lunch so I got back to my room about 9:30, ate, and went to sleep. Hopefully I will be meet up with some of the myITforum people today.
My wife and daughter arrive later today and we have tickets to the Padres game at Petco, we have been to a couple games there at it is a really nice stadium, it is well designed. No matter where you sit you can see. They are going to Sea World tomorrow, then shopping on Thursday, the closing party Thursday night, and then more shopping on Friday.
So on to the sessions:
Session one was LW01 Managing Group Policy Using GPMC. This is an instructor led lab, some of the highlights are that GPMC will be included in Vista, you won’t have to download it, an enforced GPO that is linked to parent OU will always be inherited even if block inheretence is set and enforced GPO’s take precedence over any GPO’s that are linked, and they covered how to backup and restore a GPO, how to generate reports, and some other high level GPO tasks. If you are new to th GPMC this is a good session to get the feel of the tool.
Session two was LC17 Upgrading SMS 2003 RTM to SMS 2003 SP2 – Wally Meed was the instructor for this session and he always puts on a good a show. In this session you have two clients, a site server and a secondary site, all need to be upgraded to SP2. This lab was a good lab for a practice run if you do not have a test lab or are still using 2.0. Wally shows you how to make a backup of your SMS db and use it to create a dummy db, and then test the db upgrade on it, how to use the Deployment Readiness Wizard, and upgrade your site server as well as your clients. All and all this was a good session, the hardware was a little taxed with four virtual machines running but that it to be expected with that many VM’s. Wally is a great presenter and and true SMS expert, he makes any session worth it.
My third session was scheduled to by Intro to SMS v4, I was a couple minutes late and the session was already full, they had let all the wait list people and standby people so all the seats were occupied so make sure that you are at your session before it starts. Since I am in the Beta for v4 it was probably better that someone else got my seat.
My next session was LN01 – SMS 2003 Desired Configuration Monitoring (DCM). This had four sections first, extend the SMS_DEF.MOF to prepare for DCM. Create service configuration manifests to check WMI, Registry, IIS Metabase, AD, and WFS. Secondly, learn how to run the DCM app, third, install DCM on the central site server, and how to create manifests. It was an interesting session, they are going to make some changes to lab due to some missing steps, some people don’t like it when steps are missing or incorrect, personally I think I learn and remember more when I have to think. It was also interesting to listen to some in the hallway after the session and their opinions. One person thought it was not a fully baked idea and that it was not a realistic product for a mid-sized company. I am not sure I agree, I think it still needs some more work, but they even said that, and creating a manifest is not an easy task if you are not sure what you are doing. I think it will be a great addition to the MOF and once they get the manifests published it will be a great tool. Since the manifests are XML you should be able to do some really cool stuff like monitor desktops.
The last session was LC09 – Automating SMS Tasks with Monad Scripting – Let me first say Matt O’Leary you left your Sidekick in the room and I turned it into the presenter Jim Bradbury. Jim is also a great presenter, and a really nice guy. Out of my four sessions I sat in yesterday this one was the best one. Not only is Jim a good presenter but this was a great introduction to Monad. In this session you learn how to connect to the SMS provider, create a package, program, and advertisement. You also learn how to manipulate the client, make changes to your site, and some other tasks. But this really teaches you how to use monad. So if you have a programming background it is very similar to C#, variables start with $, it follows the method.properties concept. The session was very informative and after I left I felt that I understood how to use Monad, while I am certainly not an expert I felt it gave me enough info that I had already come up with some ideas of what I would like to do with it on my own to help me out. Jim provided this a great blog for Monad.
All and all, long day but well worth it. The first keynote is this morning, and I have some really great sessions for today the SMS State of the Union is after the keynote, SMS Files 2006, Windows Vista Client Overview, Group Policy in Vista and Longhorn server and then the infamous BOF session on the SMS documentation. Should be a great day today!
Just got an email that new build (5365) of Vista is available for download.