Recap on a great Configuration Manager Community Event (#CMCE1710) in Zurich

Yesterday the CMCE1710 event took place in Zurich, hosted by Mirko. It was a great community event with huge community power and great technical content delivered by the EM&S MVPs Roger Zander, Ronny de Jong and Mirko Colemberg.

Why I do the recap?

With this short blog post, I would like to call more attention on events like that! Specially for people in the Workplace Engineering and Office365 business. If you attend CMCE or other similar great Events, you will get a lot of information about new technologies, best practices. Having a chance to place your questions directly during the sessions to the experts about your current issues or opportunities. A similar Event in Switzerland is the Experts Live Café held in Bern.

What was the content?

First, the content was great! My first session attending, I gave Matrix42 another chance to satisfy me about their Enterprise Manager (EM). The EM is not a tool that replaces ConfigMgr, this was very important to David König – Chef Program Manager of the EM. The tool should help you to easy manage complicated tasks in ConfigMgr. Specially with Reports, Role Based Access and Rollout Plans. Matrix42 made a great effort with the new End-User Agent based on a Chrome Engine. This is how ConfigMgr should notify users in a modern way.

After a break, I was attending the Session from Ronny de Jong, MVP EM&S. As always, great content delivered here! Ronny was talking about all the possibilities of ConfigMgr and Cloud Services. ConfigMgr has currently nine direct connections to Azure based Applications. One topic he talked about, was the ConfigMgr Cloud Management Gateway(CMG). In my point of view, each customer with Mobile Users – doesn’t matter if they use a Laptop, Surface Book or Tablets – should use a Cloud Management Gateway. The Setup is much easier than the old way to get Internet based clients attached to your ConfigMgr Hierarchy. You don’t need any servers in your DMZ (you need an Azure Subscription instead) and the certificate handling is much more easier. If you not have looked at the CMG, do it now!

The whole afternoon was just great, with real stuff and information delivered by David James (Director of Engineering ConfigMgr Microsoft Redmond), also known on Twitter as @djammmer.

David presented his personal IT career during the last years, specially at Microsoft and how the product changed from SMS to ConfigMgr. A really great story with a lot of great people working on that product. He took questions by the beginning and answers directly during the whole afternoon. Some topics where Telemetry Data, Co-Management with Intune, a REST-API currently in TP, Cloud Management Gateway and Client Health.  I’m not able to cover everything here because this should be a short recap. But one of my favorite question from David to the audience was: “Do you think ConfigMgr is dead? Then raise your hand(s)”.  Not one hand was raised!

David explained how many times SCCM was declared as dead but the history says something different!

Full house at CMCE1710

For me, it was a great honor to meet David personally, the director of the tool I mostly have in front of me: System Center Configuration Manager #ConfigMgr #SCCM. Thanks for being here!

From the right: Martin Wüthrich, itnetX – Jakob Filipovsky, itnetX, David James, Microsoft – Roger Zander, itnetX, Alain Schneiter, itnetX

Thanks to Mirko for the great Event!