This year, PSU generously offered to send me to a conference for the purposes of professional development. There are several Mac-centric conferences in existence at the moment: MacTech, Apple’s WorldWide Developers Conference (WWDC), The JAMF Nation User Conference (JNUC) and our own Penn State MacAdmins Conference. Although I’ll already be attending the Penn State Admins Conference this spring, I felt the MacIT Conference in San Francisco, California still had much to offer.
MacIT started when WWDC removed the IT portion of their conference to focus on iOS and Mac development. Although I attended two years ago on my own, I found that the conference had matured since I had last made the trip. The MacIT Conference runs parallel to the Macworld/iWorld Conference – while MacIT centers around deployment and management, Macworld/iWorld covers broader, typically more creative, topics.
I took the opportunity to visit San Francisco a few days early and use some vacation time – it was nice to have a break from the ice and snow, here in State College. I became familiar with the city, and got to meet up with friends. It was nice to have a few days to get settled before focusing on the conference.
My manager, Justin Elliott, encouraged me to attend one of the pre-conference workshops offered by MacIT. I decided upon an all-day session about Apple’s deployment solutions hosted by two members of the MacIT advisory board, Arek Dreyer and Kevin White. They covered 10.8 Mountain Lion Server, including Profile Manager. As someone who had little familiarity with OS X Server since 10.6 Snow Leopard, it was great to get up to speed with Apple’s best practices – and understand their limitations. Although we’re phasing out OS X Server, I believe profiles could be useful as we further adopt Tivoli Endpoint Manager for the Mac labs.
The first official day of the conference (and my second day in attendance), I learned a lot about FileVault 2 from Rich Trouton’s talk. Although he had given a similar talk at the Penn State MacAdmins Conference last May, he covered different deployment methods at MacIT – his talk at the JAMF Nation User Conference was customized for using JAMF’s Casper Suite, for example. In addition, a common theme was to incentivize your users to “do the right thing” – especially because, in most cases, it’s not possible to lock down an iOS device. Users can easily remove profiles from an iPad or iPhone, so your tactic needs to focus less on restricting the features of the device and more to help your users use the devices effectively.
There was a great session presented by Jody Rogers of Adobe, along with several other Adobe team members. They covered what the “Creative Cloud” means: they’re phasing out the large Creative Suite packages, and will offer application upgrades as they’re ready. A yearly subscription will ensure that users have access to the latest versions of Adobe’s creative applications. While people were apprehensive about this at first, Jody understood our concerns about deployment – after some discussion, I believe this will be a step forward. It was great to talk to the Adobe team, as well – they’re truly trying to move to Apple’s standard package format, which will help us greatly when deploying Adobe’s products.
I got to meet the TwoCanoes guys, as well – Tim Perfitt has emerged as an important figure within the Mac administration community, particularly with the revival of AFP548. He and his assistant, TJ Caracci, were great to talk to.
The next day, I attended a couple of great sessions about logging, given by Andrea Longo of Splunk. She even included some exercises with her slides, allowing anyone to learn from her talk, even without having attended the conference.
That evening, I met up with the folks from AFP548, which was fun. Derick Okihara spoke a little about iOS deployment (a huge theme this year), and we all talked about how to get involved with the Mac admin community – which mailing lists to join, how to behave in IRC, etc.
I decided to visit the expo floor for the first time the next day. I got to speak to someone from CrashPlan, which was really nice. I said hello to the friendly people of Other World Computing, then attended a session about repair presented by iFixit. I later met up with the iFixit guys at a Hackerspace called Noisebridge that evening. It was great! A hackerspace is a community area maintained by a group of people who want a workspace. They had a lot of tools and parts, and we had some great discussions. We got a tour, and I got to see their three 3D printers and robot!
The last day of the conference, I attended Mike Boylan and Nick McSpadden’s session on Mac management – they focused on Munki, DeployStudio, and InstaDMG. As I’d had no experience with Munki, it was nice to see the software in action. Andrea Longo offered to give a few of us a tour of TechShop, a commercial hackerspace. Although both Noisebridge and TechShop were founded by their respective communities, TechShop is considered a commercial venture. TechShop had some very impressive tools, but required you to pass a safety class to use each machine. They’re opening a TechShop in Pittsburgh soon – it sounds like it’d make a nice day trip in the spring.
As the conference had ended, I made a longer stop to the expo floor that day. I got to tell DriveSavers that I think they’re awesome, and went to tell AgileBits the same when I ran into Nadyne Richmond – she was requesting support for alternative sync services for 1Password. She encouraged me to speak next year about being new to this profession – we’ll see. I also met up with Nuance, and discussed our difficulties purchasing their products last summer – it was good to meet face-to-face with someone, considering the issues we had over the phone.
That night, I met up with Mike Boylan, Andrew Duszczyszyn, Tom Bridge, Joe Chilcote, and Ben Greisler. It was a perfect end to a great week!
I can’t put into words how appreciative I am that Penn State was willing to send me on this trip – I learned so much and was proud to represent the university. I’m not known for being adventurous with food, but I even expanded my palette over the course of this trip. Ever eat at an Irish pub that only served Indian food? I have.
I didn’t take nearly enough photos, but I posted some to my Twitter feed. Feel free to take a look!
I recommend this conference to anyone looking for an experience that compliments our own MacAdmins Conference – San Francisco is a very different city from State College, and the crowd that meets at Macworld is somewhat different than the crowd we see here in May.
Although it’ll be hard to top this year, I’m already looking forward to MacIT 2014!
Posted in Meta
|
