Sunday the day began great, normally you should have a nice and quiet Sunday, but this is Vegas and MMS so you need to catch up with friends and meet new friends along the way. That’s what’s MMS is all about, meeting your peers from all over the world. So I had a busy day meeting lots of new people which ended with a very long diner with some of my fellow Configuration Manager MVPs, guys from Dell, 1E and Microsoft.
Yesterday the Microsoft Management Summit has been kicked off for me with an early Private Cloud exam and three sessions about the new Configuration Manager 2012 and the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2012 and one preparation session for another exam that I will take at Thursday. After finishing the exam I learned how to secure your environment with the compliance settings feature within Configuration Manager 2012. Nice was to finally meet two guys (Santos Martinez and Brett Bennet) which I worked with on the Mastering System Center 2012 Configuration Manager book. Can’t wait until it hits the market on May the 8th on Amazon!
The second session of the day was a session about customizing the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit. Was a really good in-depth session from Keith Garner, got some nice tips and tricks.
The third session of the day was a really nice session from Citrix about the integration of their products (XenApp and XenDesktop) with the System Center 2012 suite (Configuration Manager, Virtual Machine Manager and Operations Manager).
The Configuration Manager 2012 integration of XenApp looks really good, XenApp will be a deployment type within the new Application Model. This way you can manage your applications from one console, the Configuration Manager 2012 console. Users can start their applications from the Application Catalog, depending on the requirement rules it will fire up a XenApp application or another deployment type. More on this in a later blog!
The last session of the day was an exam cram session for the exam which I will be taking on Thursday. In one hour a 5 day course flew by 🙂