Registration Complete!

Today Colin and I arrived bright and early for registration at 8am, as did a couple of other thousand people. I have to say they did a good job of getting people queued and processed quickly. I'm sure an English person must have been involved to make the queue just right ;-)

For the morning, there are no lecture type sessions planned, so I did some self paced labs, I have spent some time in the next version of System Center Configuration Manager, currently branded v.Next. It has a completely new interface which reminds me of Outlook/MoM consoles in its layout but is no longer based on the MMC, which has been the MS admin console basis for a number of years.

A couple of interesting notes I made during the lab was that there seems to be a lot more around asset management and compliance - this seems to allow you to configure your own rules. Furthermore it has the ability to import software licenses(XML or CSV format) so I'll try to find out a bit more about that during the week. Currently we partner with a vendor called Concorde to help us with our compliance, it may be the next version of SCCM can provide more in house.

Second thing I found whilst browsing around the admin console is that they have formally introduced pre-staged media as a build option. This would allow us to provide HP/Dell with a pre-built image of a desktop/laptop/server which they can install and ship. Once on the network it would receive any changes in the meantime. This would be a pretty rapid way to deploy servers and clients and again I'll listen out for more details in the lectures.

Unfortunately due to the Icelandic Volcano many EU based attendees, vendors and speakers have not made it here, so sessions are being juggled. Today I'll be attending - Virtualisation scenarios for business critical apps, Win7 deployment with MDT and Configuration Manager Dashboard.
The Vendor Expo opens at 17.30 so I'll take a first look around and see if I can meet some of the new vendors we will be introducing to our environment with the Connex project. (Intrinsic and SCCM Expert).