Midwest Management Summit 2018 - Day 4

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, day 2, and day 3 in previous posts.

Certificates and PKI for System Admins

Speakers: Jason Sandys

Jason did a fantastic job dumbing down PKI for those of us who might be completely clueless.

What I'm excited about:

• Not doing this the wrong way (there were some great pointers in his slides about difficult-to-reverse mistakes)
• Finally getting my internal PKI running on Windows Hardware.
• Having a better understanding about how public and private keys work together.

Patching: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Speakers: Bryan Dam and Daniel Ratliff

After hearing Bryan's fight against CM & WSUS in yesterdays patching session, I had to get into this session today and I'm glad there was availability.

What I'm excited about:

• Fixing my environment!  No matter how good you might have it, there are still so many ways to improve and these guys touched on most everything.
• Tweaking my IIS settings so that even under the worst conditions I can still gain access to my box for troubleshooting.
• Completely revamping my ADRs based on some great suggestionsby Bryan.

Let's Write a GUI Interface

Speakers: Ryan Ephgrave and Stephen Owen

I've gone from never hearing of Ryan (sorry man) to now geeking over everything he's doing.  I skipped another session to come see what these guys had to say about PowerShell.  I'm going to be honest, I cheat - I'm a PowerShell Studio user both for my personal and my profession projects.

What I'm excited about:

• Continuing to user PowerShell Studio because all these other options are way too much work :-)
• Testing out building forms with Visual Studio, just to have that in my belt.
• Looking into PoshGUI because it looks pretty neat.

Everything Else . . .

My day ended with the MMS Hackathon results and my head spinning.  I guess what I'm most excited about now is getting home safely and figuring out how I'm going to implement everything I learned over this past four days.  Huge thanks to all the folks who put on MMS and especially to all the speakers who have the courage to stand up in front of everyone and are willing to share your knowledge.  Congratulations to the #Hackathon winners!