As you might have noticed by the glut of MMS 2012 blog posts, I’ve spent the last 7 days in Las Vegas at the Microsoft Management Summit 2012 conference. It was a good week. I mostly hung out with the small group of Irish delegates but it was good to meet many folks from around the world that I regularly communicate with, as well some of you readers.
The content of the week was interesting. The majority of it was level 100 or introductory show-and-tell. For me and the role I do in technical sales, I valued the sessions that gave real world examples. The best of those was the one on Thursday evening that was delivered by the Inframon guys, looking at real world examples of where they’ve deployed integrated System Center 2012 solutions with automated remediation.
Another interesting sessions was the one on the Visio Management Pack Designer (VMPD). The MP authoring tool is dreadfully documented in my opinion and hard to get into, so a visual tool that’s easy to pick up and create custom MPs from is greatly appreciated.
The keynotes were interesting, as long as you hadn’t read the spoiler press releases by MSFT marketing. MSFT marketing does something good from time to time, such as Tad, but most of the time they … well … you know that 200 people that were let go from MSFT marketing recently? Maybe they let the wrong people go.
Keynotes are usually aimed at people who don’t keep up with events, and those of us who do are usually bored silly. But we all got something this week. In day one we got the new name of Windows Server 2012 and a funny video with Vijay Tewari making the most of his free time thanks to automation. In the day 2 keynote we got a real surprise. The day before I was talking about the deep versus light management of mobile devices in ConfigMgr 2012 and joking how one was better off with a Windows Mobile 6.5 phone if deep management was their goal. But damn, did they come through with the vNext (aka 2012 SP1) news. Side loading of apps onto Android and iOS is a BIG deal. And to be able to do that with both ConfigMgr 2012 SP1 and Intune vNext is very cool. The demo was a little ropey thanks to a projector cable malfunction but the keynote team adapted and overcame the problem on the fly – well done!
You may not have read between the lines: Windows Phone 7.x cannot be side loaded with apps like Android and iOS because of its security model. I was told this at the Intune booth in the Expo hall.
Overall, we had a blast this week. But I am glad to be leaving the 90F temperatures, the perfumed air conditioning, and the constant ding-ding-ding of the slot machines behind. Now if only I was allowed to bring this Heckler & Koch G36 home … 
