More MMS Goodness

This is from the 1E site, but down towards the bottom you can see the schedule for demos at the 1E stand.  I will be presenting at least a couple times.  Brian Tucker and Neil Kimberly will also be presenting at the stand on other topics.  If you think I know SMS/ConfigMgr then you haven’t spent much time talking to Brian and Neil these guys are AMZAZING!

1E MMS Focus

1E will be exhibiting as a Gold Sponsor at the Microsoft Management Summit at the Venetian Hotel, Las Vegas from April 28 to May 2, 2008.

With a focus on System Center Success and ‘green’ IT, we will be highlighting:

• Expertise in deploying System Center solutions
• Automation solutions that dramatically reduce cost and complexity
• PC power management
• Self-service provisioning with licence control
• Content distribution and OS migration/deployment for distributed environments
• Actual customer experiences with proven ROI

SPEAKER SLOT: Real-world System Center success including PC power management: Significantly lower your PC and server management costs

Speaker: Sumir Karayi, CEO 1E

Date/Time: Tuesday 29, 11.45 – 13.00

Location: F-Veronese 2402-2503

Sumir Karayi, CEO 1E, will be speaking following Bill Anderson’s “ConfigMgr - State of the Nation” session. Sumir will talk about System Center and PC power management customer success stories.

1E has been providing robust integrated Windows systems management solutions for over 10 years. Come and listen to Sumir talk about real-world experiences of System Center success and PC power management implementations in large, complex, distributed environments. In this session you will learn how to address universal time and cost-saving initiatives such as:

• PC power and patch management including client health and energy usage reporting
• Automated self-service application provisioning with license management and control
• Optimization of software and OS deployments to bandwidth-constrained complex branch environments

Visit the 1E Stand 311

MMS provides us with a great opportunity to see friends – old and new. Please drop by the 1E stand to say hello, collect ‘green’ giveaways, enter our competition to win a Nintendo Wii, and attend ‘live’ technical demo sessions.

‘Live’ Theatre Demonstrations and Presentations

Tuesday April 29

1:10 - 1:30 PM PC Power Management: Go Green Overview Presentation Simon Francis

2:00 - 2:20 PM Self-Service Provisioning and License Control Anthony Clendenen

3:30 - 3:50 PM Fully Automated OS Deployment/Migrations Neil Kimberley

Wednesday April 30

1:10 - 1:30 PM PC Power Management, WOL and Client Health Brian Tucker

2:00 - 2:20 PM Fully Automated OS Deployment/Migrations Neil Kimberley

3:00 - 3:20 PM Self-Service Provisioning and License Control Anthony Clendenen

3:30 - 3:50 PM Bandwidth Optimization for Complex/Branch Environments Brian Tucker

Thursday May 1

1:10 - 1:30 PM Bandwidth Optimization for Complex/Branch Environments Brian Tucker

2:00 - 2:20 PM PC Power Management & Energy Usage Reporting Brian Tucker

Regards,
Anthony

Anthony Clendenen | Solutions Engineer | 1E

http://configmgr.com

© Anthony Clendenen

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Attending MMS 2008? Yes I Am - We Are

I have gotten a ton of emails asking me if I am going to be at MMS this year and when and up until now I have held off because I was waiting for some things to finalize.  But today 1E sent out an email to customer letting them know the booth number, and when Sumir, one of the founders of 1E, was going to speak.  Which is right after the State of the Union, and also at the same time as Paul Thomsen is presenting his session on ConfigMgr Client Health.  So yes, I will be there from Sunday to Friday afternoon.  And we are trying to get my wife to be able to attend at least a day or more as well, I know some of you look forward to seeing her more than me - but I won’t mention any names, you know who you are! Not that I can really blame you…

I will be doing my best to blog live or very close to it when I am there but this year I will have to actually work so it may be more hit and miss regarding coverage of the sessions for those who can’t attend or those who use my posts for your justification to attend. 

We will be having demos at the booth of the different 1e products and most of us can also do an impromptu demo if you want to see something that isn’t on the schedule.  Just hunt me down and I can arrange it. 

There is more info on the 1E presence below, our booth is in the second row right as you walk in the doors. I am finalizing some plans to hold a special session in one of our conference rooms and when that it finalized I will publish the detail of it.

I look forward to meeting up with a bunch of you again I am sure there will be quite a few people from the myITforum.com list, Microsoft, and Dimension Data that I haven’t seen in at least a few months, people like Omar it has been since last MMS. 

Dear Colleague,

1E will be exhibiting at the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) in Las Vegas from
April 28 - May 2, 2008. Please come and visit us on Stand 311, where you can:

· Find out how to dramatically reduce the cost of running Windows infrastructures

· See ‘live’ technical demos of our core solutions

· Discover how you can quickly & easily save $45 per PC per year

· Find out how Dell is saving $1.8 million a year across 50k PCs

· Enter our competition to win a Nintendo Wii

Come and listen to 1E CEO Sumir Karayi speak, following Bill Anderson’s "ConfigMgr - State
of the Nation" session.  Sumir will talk about real customer System Center and PC power management success stories.

Speaker: Sumir Karayi, CEO 1E

Date/Time: Tuesday 29, 11.45 – 13.00

Location: F-Veronese 2402-2503

1E has been providing robust integrated Windows systems management solutions for over 10 years. Join us as we detail real-world experiences of System Center success and PC power management implementations in large, complex, distributed environments.

» Book a 1:1 meeting
Use this opportunity to book a pre-arranged 1:1 meeting with 1E while you are at MMS. This
will give you the chance of discussing your requirements with us at an agreed date and time, and make sure that you maximize your attendance at the event.

For more information, please visit the 1E website.

We look forward to seeing you at MMS 2008.

Best regards,
1E Events Team

www.1e.com

Regards,
Anthony

Anthony Clendenen | Solutions Engineer | 1E

http://configmgr.com

© Anthony Clendenen

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Nomad Enterprise Webcast - March 5

It is not often I blog about 1E, I think it has only happened once before actually.  Even before I got an offer from them they told me they didn’t want me to blog about them or their products because they didn’t want my blog to turn into PR for 1E.  And over the last year I have not talked about the products at all.  But as you may have noticed the number of posts I put up have also dropped dramatically.  Well I spend most of my time working with the 1E products, back when I was at ESRI I spent most of my time working on SMS, so if I don’t blog about the 1E products I don’t have too much else to talk about.  But I have been thinking about this over the past few weeks and I think I am going to politely ignore their request to not talk about 1E products.  I think there is some extremely cool stuff that 1E offers, be it Services or products and as long as I talk about what I want and not what the Marketing guys and gals tell me I think I can keep my blog from turning into a 1E ad.  I mean look at how many people at Microsoft blog, and what do they blog about?  Microsoft! 

If you don’t know what Nomad is, it rocks!  You can get rid of those pesky, lowly, DP’s in every single remote office with Nomad.  When you use Nomad only one of your SMS clients on the subnet copies the package down from the DP.  It pulls it down and then lets all the other clients on that subnet copy, or better yet, streams it to them in a Multicast session.  So you only have one client that makes the trip to the DP instead of each client, saving you all that bandwidth and from having to manage the DP.  One of the best features is the way it handles bandwidth throttling, it does real time bandwidth throttling that you can configure.  It doesn’t just use an arbitrary figure it measures the amount of time it takes for a round trip to the DP and back, and then based on what you have configured, say 20%, it will use 20% of the bandwidth that is actually available, and it does this each time it goes and grabs another piece of the package from the DP so if the user who is the one that is caching the package for that subnet fires off a copy of a huge file it will immediately notice it and remeasure the available bandwidth and only use 20% of what is left over, so the user never even notices!  I told you it rocks!  There are some other really cool features too, but I don’t want to steal all of Brian’s thunder.  Check it out by attending the webcast and tell Brian I sent you.

Register here.

Event Title

Nomad Enterprise Solution Overview

 

Event Description

Nomad Enterprise enables OS releases, software applications and updates to be distributed quickly and efficiently to remote serverless branch offices and to bandwidth-challenged environments.

This 30 minute Webinar will allow you the opportunity to ask questions and learn directly from 1E Solutions Engineer, Brian Tucker.

Regards,
Anthony

Anthony Clendenen | Solutions Engineer | 1E

http://configmgr.com

© Anthony Clendenen

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Top Ten Events in Systems Management During 2007

First of all, Happy New Year, and may everyone find that in 2008 that your glass is more than half full, you and your loved ones are all very healthy and overly happy, that your careers are very prosperous, and that you gain all that you desire and more. 

As we welcome another year and reflect on the year ending it is always nice to note what was the highlights of the year.  So below is my personal top ten of 2007 when it comes to Systems Management.

10.  Thursday, October 23rd, System Center Partner Airlift.  It was actually the dinner on Thursday night that got this on the list.  I set dinner for about 12 people at a local steak house, Daniel’s, and it ended up that at this dinner we had sitting around the table, Jeff Gilbert, Michael Niehaus, Paul Thomsen, Garth Jones, and Greg Ramsey, amongst others.

9.  New class in SMS 2003 SP3 causes CPU’s to jump to 100% utilization, and is fixed.

8.  Saturday, July 7th, SoftGrid 4.2 was available, adding support for Vista. 

7.  Monday, May 7th, System Center Essentials goes RTM.  This doesn’t get a lot of press either but for SMB sized companies this has great potential.

6.  Monday, April 23rd, I started my new position with 1E, I did say my personal top 10 so this had to come in somewhere on the list!

5.  Friday, March 23rd, System Center Operations Manager goes RTM.  While we don’t often talk much about it, it is still a great milestone.

4.  Wednesday, November 14th, Microsoft Deployment was released.  After Michael, Tim, and the other team members had been slaving away for months it was finally ready for all of us.

3.  Friday, April 27th, SMS 2003 SP3 was released.  The AssetIntel piece makes this a very important service pack for those sticking with SMS 2003.

2.  Monday, March 26th, MMS 2007 opens in San Diego, CA.  This is always such a great event.  The training, meeting people, product news, it can’t be beat and each year it gets better and larger.

1. On August 24th 4 PM PDT, System Center Configuration Manager goes RTM.

Regards and Happy New Year!
The Clendenen’s

Anthony Clendenen | Solutions Engineer | 1E

http://configmgr.com

© 2007 Anthony Clendenen

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MMS 2008 Registration Now Open

Run - don’t walk, hand carry that training request through management for registration!  If you need assistance with the justification check here.

Back by popular demand MMS returns to Vegas this year, some of you may recall the Sea World party that Microsoft threw for my birthday two years ago, on April 27th, well this year MMS starts the day after my birthday on April 28th.  If you book your hotel through registration you can get a room at the Venetian for only $239/night for four nights, I went to the Venetian’s web site and a room for the cheapest room for the same dates is $399/night, it also where the conference is being held, so if you may have over indulged the night before it is not too far to the sessions or if you really over indulged it’s not too far back to your room.

I really enjoy this event, it is very nice to actually talk to everyone and meet some of the people you only see in the mailing lists and forums, and of course to catch up with old friends as well.  But it is by far the BEST training you can get for ConfigMgr and you can actually talk to Wally, you will have to bring two friends to hold him still while you talk, but you can really talk to the Microsoft people that work day-in and day-out on ConfigMgr and the other management products, not just an email but really discuss things with them and learn a tremendous amount and get a deeper understanding of the products, their features, and what is being planned.  Oh yeah, and the other vendors are there too like myITforum, so you can grill them talk to them.

Some useful links:

MMS 2008 home page

MMS 2008 Registration page (Prices go up after March 18th)

MMS 2008 Group Registration page, for those companies sending multiple people.

MMS Alum send email with your email address in the subject line

MMS 2008 Agenda page

MMS 2008 Hands On Lab page (will have content in Feb)

MMS 2008 Content Survey page where you can help determine what is included at MMS!

Official email contents:

Event Overview

In the past year Microsoft has released a range of new management products and technologies, including seven new System Center suite releases alone.  MMS 2008 provides the best way to learn how to apply these solutions in your organization, fueling productivity and building growth.

With sessions by technical experts, opportunities to try out new products and meetings to discuss them with leading Industry experts and peers, MMS 2008 remains the premiere technical event of the year for IT professionals and the IT community.

Event Theme

The theme of this year’s Microsoft Management Summit is Integrate IT, reflecting the increasingly complex world of IT Management and the key role integration has to play in reducing complexity while maximizing flexibility, availability and performance.  Sessions from Microsoft speakers and industry experts during MMS 2008 will focus on how the latest wave of management solutions support:

• Integration with your business objectives
• Integration across your IT disciplines
• Integration between your management products and technologies
• Integration across platforms and vendor boundaries

Event Agenda

MMS 2008 will offer more deep technical breakout sessions than ever before, covering a broad range of Management topics and technologies. Daily Q&A slots also allow attendees to meet the presenters and discuss specific session content informally in a 1:1 format. In addition, the event will provide over 9,000 Hands-On Lab places during the week, including more Instructor-led Labs than in previous years and a “walk-in” self-paced lab area.  All of Microsoft’s Management solutions, together with those provided by Partners, will be on show at the MMS 2008 Expo where you’ll have the opportunity to review the solutions and discuss your specific requirements with company experts.

Attending MMS 2008 will enable you to harness the power of System Center by Integrating IT with your business goals.  Visit the conference web site at www.mms-2008.com for more details of the overall agenda and registration information.

Event Content

Recent Microsoft product releases which will be covered in detail during MMS 2008 include:

• System Center Operations Manager 2007
• System Center Configuration Manager 2007
• System Center Data Protection Manager 2007
• System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007
• System Center Essentials 2007
• System Center Remote Operations Manager 2007
• System Center Capacity Planner 2007
• Desktop Optimization Pack for SA
• Windows Server Update Services 3.0

In addition during the event there will be early looks at some releases due to ship during the coming year, including:

• System Center Configuration Manager 2007 SP1
• System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R2
• System Center Operations Manager 2007 SP1
• System Center Mobile Device Manager

MMS 2008 is the ideal opportunity to come listen to the product teams describe these new releases, try out the new products and discuss real-world deployment experiences with leading industry experts and your peers within the IT industry.

Content Survey

If you’d like to help in the content selection process for MMS 2008, we invite you to complete the MMS 2008 Content Survey. By taking a few minutes to tell us about your experience and information needs, you’ll help ensure the topics and labs presented at the event are relevant to you and your organization. The survey can be accessed here and should take no more than 10 minutes to complete.  When the survey closes we will draw four entries from amongst the responses and will send a Portable Media Player to those respondents.

Registration

This year the summit will be returning to The Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada.  Two different registration options are available for MMS 2008 attendees - you may either purchase your MMS 2008 registration and hotel accommodation separately, or as a package.

If you choose to register using the “Package” option, your registration fee includes accommodation for the nights of April 28^th – May 1^st 2008 at the Venetian Hotel. This is adjacent to the event venue, a short walk from the Conference venue.  Alternatively you may choose to purchase accommodation separately from your registration or during the registration process.  The MMS 2008 Event Team has negotiated a special rate at the Venetian Hotel, available only through the registration web site. Details of the accommodation on offer are provided at the MMS 2008 web site.

Hope to see you all there.

Regards,
Anthony

Anthony Clendenen | Solutions Engineer | 1E

http://configmgr.com

© 2007 Anthony Clendenen

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Tired Of Your Job? How about $105-120k for an SMS 2003 to SCCM Job?

If you are interested send me a copy of your resume and I will forward it on to the recruiter, the requirements are listed below.  This is with a federal agency located on the east coast.

Skill set and experience:

Experience with managing SMS in a multi-site environment including the ability to troubleshoot all aspects of SMS via analyzing log files on both server and clients

Job Duties:

Require consultant with extensive experience with SMS to perform the following tasks:

(1) Advise the Agency on the best design for System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2007 in a multi-site environment.

(2) Upgrade from SMS 2003 to SCCM 2007. 

(3) Create a disaster recovery plan for the SCCM 2007

(4) Implement Microsoft Business Desktop Deployment (BDD) 2007 & Microsoft Operating System Deployment feature pack (OSD). This will better prepare the Agency to upgrade its desktop environment to Windows Vista.

(5) Troubleshoot SMS infrastructure and packaging issues Create SMS package deployment business process.

(6) Evaluate Agency’s current SMS web reports for software modifications.

(7) Create a business process for SMS web reporting. SMS consultant will be responsible for providing Agency with the following Work Products:

            a. Upgrade plan for SMS 2003 to SCCM 2007.

            b. Implement upgrade plan for SMS 2003 to SCCM 2007.

            c. Disaster recovery plan for the SMS infrastructure.

            d. Implementation Plan for Microsoft Business Desktop Deployment (BDD) 2007 & Microsoft Operating System Deployment feature pack (OSD).

            e. Implementation of Microsoft Business Desktop Deployment (BDD) 2007 & Microsoft Operating System Deployment feature pack (OSD).

            f. Business process for SMS package creation.

            g. SMS web reports business process.

Project description:

Agency has contracted prime for the overall evaluation, design, implementation, sizing and upgrades of the structure of the Agency’s Active Directory, Group Policy Objects, System Management Server, Windows Internet Naming Service, Dynamic Naming Service, and Email. The Agency’s environment includes Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2000, and Windows Server 2003 for all Agency users and workstations in those environments.

The following technologies are used for scripting at the Agency’s: DOS Batch files, ADSI, LDAP, Kixstart and Visual Basic. The contractor shall have a high level of technical expertise with these scripting technologies in order to automate administrative tasks, software deployment, logon script development. The contractor shall have the ability to leverage languages such as JAVA, Cold Fusion, HTML, and SQL query to extract data from an SMS data base running on MS SQL server and build Web pages tracking software deployments & problems with the SMS infrastructure.

Restrictions:

(1) MUST BE A US CITIZEN

Regards,
Anthony

Anthony Clendenen | Solutions Engineer | 1E

http://configmgr.com

© 2007 Anthony Clendenen

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AZSMUG Meeting Oct 2nd

I know you miss me by now, its been about six months since you saw me last at MMS, back then I worked for a different company and Vista was still brand  new, ConfigMgr was just in its first public beta, and the Chargers has a head coach.  Well next Tuesday is your chance to come and see me again I will be presenting at Mike Terrill’s user group meeting on, you guessed it, ConfigMgr for two hours.  I am not a huge fan of PowerPoint so I will be doing as much demo as possible.  Mike is giving away some books and other stuff so if you are in the area follow the link below and register and we will see you on Tuesday.

We are planning on having our fourth quarter meeting.  This meeting will be held at Microsoft’s downtown Phoenix Office: 2929 N Central Ave, suite 1400 on Tuesday, October 2nd.  The meeting will start at 5:30 PM (welcome time is 5:15 PM), but BE SURE to arrive early, and remember that you cannot enter the building after 6:00 PM.

If you haven’t already heard the news, System Center Configuration Manager 2007 was release to manufacturing (RTM) on Friday, August 24^th.  What could possibly be a better topic for this meeting?  Come and get an inside look at the next version of SMS.

As always, we will be raffling off some goodies.  This time we will have some books and software to give away.

Please register for the meeting here so we can plan accordingly:
http://www.clicktoattend.com/?id=120679

Job corner:

Jeremy Nichols is a recruiter in the Phoenix area and has a few SMS and packaging roles available.  If you are interested, you can contact him at Jeremy.Nichols@modisit.com.  Here is the description:

“I have multiple SMS roles, I have 2 SMS Admin/Engineer projects, a Scripter – scripting MSI based installation packages, and a Desktop technician to create install packages and work around/fixes for a very large deployment of Office 2007.  These are great clients, and decent length contracts (6mos each and 12mos for the Desktop).”

Thanks,
Mike Terrill
AZ Systems Management User Group
http://www.azsmug.org/
http://www.myitforum.com/groups/group87/

Regards,
Anthony

Anthony Clendenen | Solutions Engineer | 1E Inc.

http://configmgr.com

© 2007 Anthony Clendenen

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