MMS 2009 – Day 5

Last conference day at MMS is always a short day and this year was no exception. The last sessions I attended this year was:

• Troubleshooting OSD deployments with Johan Arwidmark. Once again Johan delivered a brilliant presentation as he ran through a operating system deployment while showing the various steps that goes on behind the scene.
• Configuration Manager 2007 Console Extensions with Greg Ramsey and Matthew Hudson who is also one of the developers behind some of the world famous “Config Mgr. Right Click Tools”. Developing extensions to console in Config Mgr. has changed a lot since SMS 2003. SMS 2003 used registry entries while Config Mgr. utilizes XML files placed in the .\Configuration Manager\AdminUI\XmlStoreage\Extensions\Actions. Before you start extending the console make sure you have knowledge about:
  • The GUIDS that are used to reference the objects in the console like collection, queries etc. A list of GUIDS can be downloaded: http://myitforum.com/articles/42/view.asp?id=11730
  • The SDK
  • Some of the existing tools Rick Houchins has created a medley of right click tools bundled into a single msi file download: http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/rhouchins/archive/2008/04/09/sccm-right-click-tools.aspx
  • Various ways to start the Management Console so you can view WMI classes, ID numbers etc. 

SMS:DebugView
SMS:NameSpaceView=1
SMS:NoRestore
SMS:IgnoreExtensions
SMS:VerboseErrors
Example: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Configuration Manager Console\AdminUI\bin\adminconsole.msc sms:debugview sms:verboseerrors

See you all again next year at MMS 2010, April 19-23

Fun facts from this year event

Registration by the Numbers

• 16,400: Approximate number of miles roundtrip 9 attendees flew to be at MMS 2009
• 800: Approximate number of attendees who have previously attended an MMS
• 50: The number of US states represented
• 44: The number of countries represented
• 24: The number of US states with over 20 representatives
• 6: The number of countries with more than 50 attendees
• Top countries other than the US with the highest representation: Canada, Denmark, UK, Sweden, Norway

• 159 breakouts, 16 BOF sessions, 85 ILL lab sessions and 75 different self-paced lab topics
• A total of 33,601 session bookings were received on CommNet.
• The backstage keynote demo lab for day 1 and day 2 combined included 5 server racks, 4 stand-alone servers, and 14 desktop computers.
• The Maximum ASP public cloud demo included fully-functioning private and public cloud networks, both assembled onsite in Las Vegas in 48 hours.
• The Wireless Wake-Up and Windows 7 Deployment demo featured 18 laptops in the audience connected to a live wireless network; over the course of twenty minutes, each laptop was upgraded from Windows XP to Windows 7 in real-time

Hotel Facts

• Approximately 50,000 people visit The Venetian each day (more than 18 million each year).
• The Palazzo and the Venetian together have more than 7,000 suites, making the combined space the largest hotel in the world.
• At 85,000 sq feet, the Venetain Ballroom is one of the largest obstruction-free ballrooms in the world.
• Using a standard garden hose for 24 hours a day, it would take 65 days to fill the indoor Grand Canal.
• At 50 stories and 639.5 feet tall, the Palazzo is the 2nd tallest building in Nevada.
• There is no 4th, 13th, or 14th floor in the Palazzo.
• The Palazzo contains 230,000 cubic yards of concrete. That’s enough concrete to build a six-foot wide sidewalk from the hotel all the way to the northeast corner of Yellowstone National Park.