Well all the glitz and glamor of MMS 2010 is over. The MMS will be March 21st - 25th at Mandalay bay. At this last installment we learned about InTune, the cloud computing aspect of Configuration Manager. It will offer a slimmed down version of the popular patching and software distributed model. It will allow admins to pay MS to host the hardware and infrastructure. This is going to make it easy for firms that might be too spread out to leverage infrastructure or better yet, firms that small like 1o to 50 machines in which System Center Essentials is still a bit of an over kill. We saw the next Road Map for the System Center products (ConfigMgr V.Next will come out in H2 2011). Users in the lab were able to play and learn on the beta version of the application. With the quality expressed in the beta I know we have good product for the masses in the next year.
Last year we saw that V.Next will be all 64 bit. This year we learned about the hierarchy changes (the CAS) and other changes Role Based Access Control(RBAC) There are too many new things to discuss it here. I am grateful for MMS. The MVPs have been privy to some of the information for almost 2 years. I have never been on the side of Software Engineering at the Enterprise level as with Configuration Manager. We see the dedication of the product team and what decisions they must make. We saw many changes taken and some delayed. There are 1,000s of requirements and design changes and not everything can make it into the product at the intial release. That is why we must wait for Service Packs and Revisions. Speaking of which they debuted more information about Configuration Manager's R3 and the power management that it will introduce. We should hope to see some cost savings here.
Well my presenation went ok. I didn't have the change to practice as much as I usually do. The car wreck took time and work away from it. There were points I wanted to cover like Collection structure of small to large companies as well as some complex Collections. While many people enjoyed it there were the few that wished I would have slowed down a bit and the demo wasn't as polished as it should have been. To those I say, sorry. Jumping a hill at 70MPH and crashing into ground while unconscience doesn't put a dent into the prep of things. While that was bad some people where able to present or presented late due to the ash cloud so there were some surprises with MMS. Even the weather became so cold that the closing party was moved indoors. I think I will remember this MMS as the one that was a half bubble off plumb but stood the test of time.
