How do they do that?

An interesting session for a couple of reasons. First, hearing about how exisiting customers are working around product limitations is a great way to find out the 'real' product limitations. Second, there was a discussion about 'best practice' application packaging and deployment which is as relevant to our current environment as it is to Microsoft System Center customers.

The slides are pretty good so I won't go into too much detail here, but some things we should think about are Desired Configuration Management (DCM) and a consistent hardware decommissioning process. Our process and organisation actually map fairly well to best practice with the noticeable exception of our insistence on 'bundling' the applications into monolithic updates, but it seems to me this stems from a lack of automation at the site end, so we should carefully consider what can be done to reduce the burden on our local infrastructure teams.