I just signed up for a couple of the Microsoft UK tech.days events being held in London during April.
Am really hoping to get to see Chris Jackson live as I have only previously seen him online on Channel 9 and on the 2008 TechEd recordings (2nd page, first row, far right video). He really seems to know his stuff and have a sense of humour and presentation charisma.
Is quite a big deal for me as I don’t think I will ever work in the sort of company who send their staff out to the big official MS TechEd events held globally (at least I haven’t been sent to any so far, and never having been to one, have not been able to ask the attendees what sort of company they are working for that send them to MS Tech events).
In fact, I think the last formal IT training I was sent on was over 10 years ago when I was sent on a course to learn Exchange server 5.5 administration.
Admittedly I seem to have done ok without any training, getting by using books, online examples and demos and so on. But some systems (ones from Microsoft in particular) are getting so large and so complex with so many features and capabilities built right into them that I wonder if I am doing some things inefficiently or even incorrectly.
Take desktop deployment. My current employer are using Windows Vista. One of the earlier tasks I did (after the massive mail migration I wrote about on here previously) was to replace the mix of XP and Vista will a few standardised builds of Vista using WDS. The learning process was pretty steep, and very confusing.
I could not get the answer files to work correctly for unattended installs, I gave up on trying to figure the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT). In the end I simply installed a box *eaxctly* how I wanted it to be, and then sysprep’d it with an answer file. I then used ImageX to capture the system to a .WIM file and this is what I used to deploy to new systems. Even though it works pretty well (the only bits I could not automate were the machine naming, joining the domain and Windows activation) I am still not sure I am doing it the way Microsoft intended.
Now in 2010, the office here are looking to replace Vista with Windows 7 (not just to be fashionable you understand, but there do seem to be too many issues with Vista for our liking). I downloaded with Windows Automated Installer Kit (WAIK) for Windows 7 to have a look, and it bigger and even more complex that the one for Vista was.
So I have high hopes that some bright Microsoft chappie (maybe even Chris Jackson himself) will take to the stage and say “here’s how you do it” and show me the bits I’m missing, and the bits I’m doing wrong. I am taking my laptop and will be furiously trying to record everything they say and do :oO
p.s. If you work for a company that sends you to tech events (not just the MS ones) please let me know who you are and what you do, cause I really wanna go to them too :o/
