Midwest Management Summit 2018 - Day 3

Day three is under my belt and the information overload keeps coming.  In case you missed it, I'm at the Midwest Management Summit at the Mall of America (MMSMOA) - you can read more about day 1 and day 2 in previous posts.

Patch Reporting: How Sure Are You?

Speakers: Bryan Dam and Garth Jones

This was Bryan's first time speaking at MMS, but you wouldn't know it.  He was a natural up there.  Bryan showed us the ups and downs of patch reporting, the issues he's run into, the issues he's solved, and the issues that are just unsolvable (kind of).

What I'm excited about:

• Spending more time in the existing reports, figuring out what I need, and stealing it to build my own.
• Looking at the client clean-up scripts that got referenced, especially the one that Bryan contributed to.
• Checking out the SCCM Power BI dashboard.

Configuration Manager Community Tools - 2018 Edition

Speakers: Ryan Ephgrave and Jörgen Nilsson

Is there anyone out there who can do everything they need to do in just the console?  Yeah, me neither.  In this session Ryan and Jörgen went over a number of tools that are going to help us all.  I half expected just hearing about the same rehashed (but great) things I've been using for years, but there are some great things out there I haven't tried yet.

What I'm excited about:

• Looking at Jason Sandys' startup script to perhaps keep my environment a little cleaner.  You don't know what you don't know.
• Remote Client Compliance Report - I've been looking to be able to do something like this and I've gotten my answer!
• PowerShell App Deployment Toolkit.  I actually wrote my own (not in PS) years ago and still use it.  I may actually see if I can contribute to this one, which is really exciting.

Microsoft: Windows Analytics –Your Secret Weapon for Modern Management is Data

Sponsored by Microsoft

Some interesting information here about data that's stored about our enterprise systems in OMS.

What I'm excited about:

• Diving in to Application Crash data, which I do have today (3rd party tool) but this looks promising.
• Looking into patch compliance data, especially for my remote-almost-never-connected clients.
• Sharing this data with those above me and around me - I think there's potentially some value here.

Everything Else . . .

While in-between some sessions, I also talked to the guys at Lenovo and 1E about some of their products, and I'm really excited to looking into how both of them can help me make my environment a little more modern (no, not in the Intune sense) - probably not until Q3, however.  Busy Busy!  I ended my day with the Quiz Show session which was lots of fun, sadly I did not win ;-(