Northwest System Center User Group

Register now for our January meeting!

The next NWSCUG meeting is Friday, January 15th at 10:00 am at the Civica Building in Bellevue, WA. Below is the agenda. We look forward to seeing you there!

10:00 – Welcome, and MMS 2015 review
10:10 – Building Custom ConfigMgr Reports with SQL Server Reporting Services – Greg Ramsey
11:00 – ConfigMgr Applications Deep Dive – Mark Silvey (Microsoft)
12:30 – Lunch (Sponsored by Veeam)
12:50 – Veeam Management Pack for System Center – Scott Howard
1:40 – Open Discussion
2:30 – Closing Comments and Give-Aways

Building Custom ConfigMgr Reports with SQL Server Reporting Services – Greg Ramsey will demonstrate how to build your own custom SSRS reports with dropdowns, parameters, and and charts.

ConfigMgr Applications Deep Dive – Mark Silvey and Dune Desormeaux (MS ConfigMgr Product Team) Join us for a deep dive on ConfigMgr Application Management. We look forward to answering your technical questions related to the newly released Software Center, the Application Catalog, the App Model and all other things “App”.

Veeam Management Pack for System Center – Scott Howard from Veeam will discuss and demonstrate their pre-built dashboards, reporting and root cause analysis features.

Moderated Discussion – A fairly new addition to our agenda, which we’ve received great feedback! At our meetings, we have had a great lineup of presentations from industry speakers, as well as from Microsoft – now we want to add more community involvement. Attending a user group meeting is more than just listening to presentations. It’s also about getting to know others in the room, sharing war stories, networking, and helping each other out. We want to get our attendees networking more, so we want to try something new. In the moderated discussion, we’ll agree on some topics to discuss, split into smaller groups to discuss among yourselves, and then recap discussions with the larger group. This helps us learn from each other, and build lasting relationships. Bring your hot topics!

Register now for our January meeting!

Be sure to park int he parking garage at the Civica building, as Microsoft will validate parking.

Greg Ramsey, Enterprise Mobility MVP, is the Enterprise Tools Strategist at Dell, Inc. He has a B.S. in Computer Sciences and Engineering from Ohio State University, and has coauthored many books over the years. Greg is a cofounder of the Ohio SMS Users Group and the Central Texas Systems Management User Group. Greg is also a board member of the Central Texas Systems Management User Group and the Northwest System Cener User Group.

Dune Desormeaux, Program Manager
New to the team in the last six months, responsible for ConfigMgr Remote Tools and some aspects of Application Management. Dune’s largest project since joining the team was the recent Software Center improvements.

Mark Silvey, Principal Software Engineering Manager
Manages a team of developers focusing on key areas of ConfigMgr such as the complete software deployment lifecycle and the SCCM administrative console. Mark has been in software engineering on the SCCM team for more than 11 years.

Register now for our October meeting!

The next NWSCUG meeting is Friday, October 16th at 10:00 am at the Civica Building in Bellevue, WA. Below is the agenda. We’re looking forward to seeing you there!

10:00 – Welcome and Opening Statements
10:15 – System Center Service Manager Service Requests, Creation and Use – Denali

11:30 – TBD

12:10 – Lunch (Sponsored by Shavlik)

12:30 – Shavlik Sponsor Session

1:15 – Open Discussion

2:30 – Closing Comments

Register now for our October meeting!

System Center Service Manager – Service Requests, Creation and Use

• Approach to creating SRs/Requirement gathering/Design
• How to create Service Requests in the console
• What types of Service Requests we’ve seen from customers
• Gotchas or things to think about
• Demo what things look like in the portals (Current SCSM, Cireson, New SCSM)
• Q&A

Moderated Discussion

A fairly new addition to our agenda, which we’ve received great feedback! At our meetings, we have had a great lineup of presentations from industry speakers, as well as from Microsoft – now we want to add more community involvement. Attending a user group meeting is more than just listening to presentations. It’s also about getting to know others in the room, sharing war stories, networking, and helping each other out. We want to get our attendees networking more, so we want to try something new. In the moderated discussion, we’ll agree on some topics to discuss, split into smaller groups to discuss among yourselves, and then recap discussions with the larger group. This helps us learn from each other, and build lasting relationships. Bring your hot topics!

Register now for our September meeting!

The next NWSCUG meeting is Friday, September 18th at 10:00 am at the Civica Building in Bellevue, WA. Below is the agenda. We’re looking forward to seeing you there!

10:00 – Deep dive into Software Update deployment by Raman
11:15 – TBD
12:15 – Lunch (Sponsored by Nice)
12:45 – Monitoring a Changing World with System Center Operations Manager by Richard
1:45 – Moderated Discussion
3:00 – Close
Deep dive into Software Update deployment
In this session we’ll cover the software update process, from admin processes to update installation on the SCCM client machines. We’ll look at the site system and client components involved, ports and protocols used, logs to use, as well as any common issues we’ve seen, including troubleshooting tips. Also we will cover some of the recent improvements and additions to the software updates feature.

Raman Saka is a principal engineer with Microsoft, he has been in SCCM team for around 13 years working mainly on Software Updates and Endpoint Protection features. He has been deeply involved in design, implementation and testing of these features. He has been very interested in understanding the usage patterns, feature gaps and current pain points associated with these feature and SCCM overall.

Monitoring a Changing World with System Center Operations Manager
The continual change of IT is described in many different ways – pets and cattle; modern IT; cloud; and hybrid to name a few. One of the constants is the need to understand the health of applications and the servers running those applications. Come and hear how investments in System Center Operations Manager allow you to know the health of your changing IT environment. This talk will cover monitoring Azure, Windows Nano Server, new approaches to storage monitoring and give some insight into how the SCOM development process has changed.

Richard Rundle is a Senior Program Manager in the System Center and Services group at Microsoft and currently works on System Center Operations Manager and Operations Management Suite (aka Azure Operational Insights). Richard’s background is in IT operations with a focus on monitoring for hybrid environments.

Register now