This is a long one (or long-winded) so I hope you don’t have plans to do anything exciting for a while. It’s been a crazy week, so there may be some typos in this. Enjoy!
MMS MOA 2022
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So much happened at the Midwest Management Summit (MMS) at Mall of America, in just a few days that it’s hard for me to condense it all into a single blog post. Several people (or more?) have their shared their own MMSMOA experiences on social media or on their blogs, and I encourage you to read all of them.
My experience began with leaving at 6:30 AM for a 4-hour plane trip, getting to the hotel around 11 AM (time zone shifted) and wobbling up to the front desk. Hotel check-in was at 3 PM, so I stashed my luggage, and was about to find some sort of lunch, but my plans immediately changed. As soon as I turned around, I was forced to join the brewery tour, sponsored by 2-pint. Okay, I wasn’t really forced. But having only slept a few hours, having no breakfast or lunch, my brain was running on auto-pilot (not that one, the other one).
The brewery tour buses were packed with interesting folks from all over the planet. The bus I stumbled onto was filled mostly with folks from Sweden, Belgium, Denmark, Russia, Scotland and ‘Merica. At least, that’s all I can recall. One of the Swede’s was having a great time doing his own Karaoke thing in the back, which was amazing. And I was trying to have an intelligent conversation with other intelligent people, even though I didn’t remotely qualify as intelligent at that time. It was really fun!
Special, extra-double thanks to the 2-Pint Software team for sponsoring that expedition. I got to talk with so many awesome people, or tried to, since the music was pretty loud, and the bus driver was straight out of GTA. That bus must have had some awesome shock absorbers.
After we finished up at Wabasha brewery, we headed over to Bad Weather Brewing, and somehow made it back to the hotel only 5 minutes after the speaker meet-up began. I don’t remember much of the rest of Sunday. But got a good night’s sleep.
50,000 foot Level (15240 meters for you foreign folks)
The session topics covered a lot of areas, which you can see here. The speakers should be well-known to anyone working with Microsoft products and/or managing devices and applications. The attendees, like many of the speakers, came from almost every imaginable industry or education environment.
Some of the focus areas included Intune Proactive Remediations, WUfB, Autopilot, Always-On VPN deployments with Intune, LAPS (and Cloud LAPS), OSCloud, WimWitch, patch automation, Patch My PC, network traffic and content delivery optimization, customizing task sequences, driver management, application packaging and deployment, and more.
Day 1 – Monday
Jeff Scripter and I co-presented on PowerShell Debugging techniques. Actually, he drove, and I tried to keep up. The meetings he and I had leading up to that day were really helpful for me, and I learned a lot from him on things I didn’t know about debugging, runspaces, and more. Later that day I sat in on a “Nerds of a Feather” session with Scott Corio and Donnie Taylor on PowerShell.
Day 2 – Tuesday
I don’t recall much of Tuesday. It was a blur. Going from session to session and trying to soak up a firehose of information. One of the after-parties was that evening.
Day 3 – Wednesday
I co-presented with Nathan Ziehnert on Automating ConfigMgr Health Checks. Most of that session went according to plan, except for one PowerShell function crash and me trying to sing-and-dance around it. The front row had quite a few plaid jackets which wasn’t humbling to see, but nobody threw tomatoes, so I consider it a success.
Both sessions received positive feedback, so I’ll take that as a good reaction. If you haven’t submitted your feedback yet, please do so, and please be brutally honest. You paid for these sessions, and we rely on your feedback to know if we delivered value in return. Thank you!
The rest of Day 3 was kind of a post-adrenaline depletion blur, but I think there was an after-party that day. I went to one sponsored by Patch My PC, and another sponsored by Recast Software. Both events were fantastic! The mix of food, drinks, games, conversation and laughter was well worth the trip alone.
Day 4 – Thursday
I had a few more things like a “camping session” with John Marcum and Richard Hicks. Two guys I’ve always wanted to meet and I’m glad it finally happened. I also finally got to meet Wally Mead, whom I’d not met before.
Later that day I was asked to do another “Birds of a Feather” session on PowerShell, by myself, which was fun. It was a small group, and we had a great discussion on building modules. Apparently I was a last-minute fill-in and a “real” MVP person came to take that over, but it was still a fun meeting.
Different Angles
For me it felt like there were two distinct experiences at the conference, as a speaker/presenter, and as an attendee. I need to break this into two perspectives:
On the speaker side of things: I had the honor of presenting with Jeff Scripter (yes, I know, he has the best surname on earth) on debugging PowerShell, and another session with Nathan Ziehnert on ConfigMgr health checks.
I had a great time in both of these and came away with some lessons learned as well. One of those being that I have a long way to go learning how to be a good speaker. Some are born with an innate talent for that, and others, like me, are not. But I’m always happy to learn.
From the attendee side: I finally got to meet so many people I had never met before, only “knew” online, or I hadn’t seen since MMS Jazz in 2019. I’m sure I can’t recall every name, but I’m sure that many who couldn’t escape my yapping may take weeks to recover from the torture. I could kick myself for forgetting to take more photos.
Memories
Some moments that will stay with me for a long time:
- The generosity and openness from every person I met
- All the fantastic and funny conversations
- Dinner with Sven and his wife
- Dinner with Cameron, Beth, Matthew, Chris, and Phil
- Multiple conversations with Matt Dewell, Robert Stein, Fabian, the guy standing next to Fabian who we discussed moving clusters, damn it, I can’t remember his name now, Wally Mead, Donna Ryan, Matt Zaske, Sven De Groote, James Karhan, Sandy, and many others who’s names I can’t recall (I’ll know your face and remember the topics as soon as I see you again)
- Knowing that most of you likely had the same awesome conversations with these and many more.
- Axe throwing (I suck at it)
- The hammer and nail thing (I suck at that too)
- How much I learned about things from the many conversations. From technology to house repair, investments, travel, gardening, and of course: a dozen NDA bomb drops from vendors
- The closing session and raffle announcements
There’s just so many people and so much going on during that week, that it’s a challenge for me to recall details after just a few weeks, so please don’t be offended if I forgot to mention your name.
Wrapping Up
Overall, the attendance at MMS MOA this year was really good. I was told it was lower than pre-pandemic years (not a shock), but many of the sessions I attended were packed, and standing room only. The after-hour events were all fantastic, and another great opportunity to meet more people, share experiences and ideas, and have a lot of fun. And did I mention the beer?
At MMS Jazz (2019), I think I spent 80% of my time talking with speakers and 20% with attendees. This year, I flipped that around, and spent more time meeting attendees than speakers. I learned a lot from everyone I spoke with. If I offered you any advice, especially during the after parties, confirm everything before relying on it.
- I’d like to give major kudos to Brian, Greg, Donnie and the rest of the MMS team, their spouses and families, as well as the sponsors and their teams and families.
- I’d like to thank Justin, Marie, David and the whole team at Patch My PC, Phil and Andreas at 2-Pint Software, Bryan, Fabian and the team at Recast Software, Oomnitza, VMware, Scappman, and Tanium, all of whom helped make this event happen.
- Special thanks! to Wabasha brewery, and Bad Weather Brewing, for providing great quality products and service to a bunch of beer-deprived nerds! That cigar dude in the back was interesting and I learned a lot about Cuban cigars (I’ve still managed to make it this far without ever trying a cigar, how is that possible?).
- Thanks to the hotel staff for somehow staying on top of the insanity (coffee, snacks, a/v equipment, climate controls, lighting, etc. etc.).
- And a special thanks to Microsoft for making products that keep us all employed.
Takeaways
I realized that some folks were perplexed as to why I was wearing the infamous plaid jacket this year, and I get that too. MMS has a reputation for MVP-level speakers, and I’m obviously not an MVP. But I had a great time regardless, and I learned as much as anyone else from the other presenters.
If you are thinking of attending, I would emphatically say “yes! do it!“.
MMS is more than sitting in a room listening to a speaker. It’s kept intentionally small enough to encourage direct interaction between everyone, speakers and attendees alike. You’ll learn so much that your head will hurt the next morning. But, you’ll be ready to hit the ground running when you head back home.
The biggest takeaway for me was from mingling with others. You quickly realize how many others are working to overcome the same challenges you are. I hope you can make it to the next MMS!
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5 Tips for Learning PowerShell
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This could easily be “5 tips for learning anything”, but anyhow… So, I don’t consider myself an expert on anything really. I still think I’m a student at everything, which keeps me motivated to learn more. But as the awesome Mike Kanakos says, you don’t have to be an expert to share what you know with others who just starting out.
- Start with a task you really want to automate. Something you are really familiar with. Start with something relatively simple
- Try to break that task into smaller/simpler tasks first
- Work on one of those tasks at a time
- Watch the PowerShell Tool Making videos by Don Jones: part1, part2, and part3, then watch them again
- Attend some PowerShell user group meet-ups (online or in person)
A good example comes from one of my clients. She wanted to build a script (or group of scripts) to keep a log folder clean by deleting files older than 180 days. The first step was to get a list (array) of files in the log folder, then use a filter to get only the files which are older than 180 days, then delete those files. Finally, she wanted to create a scheduled job to run the script daily. Once she mapped out those steps, she was able to focus on each one, and knock them out more easily.
Because it was a process she was already familiar with (from doing manual clean-ups), and she could break it down into separate pieces, it made the tasks easier to work on. She also watched the Don Jones toolmaking videos and praised the value they provided.
Short story: having some tools is one thing. Having a goal to build a picnic table helps associate the use of each tool to accomplish specific tasks.
Projects and Hobbies
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Some things I’ve been playing with lately:
- Running Android apps on Windows 11. I don’t know why. Just because
- .NET Interactive Notebooks in Visual Studio Code. They’re really cool!
- Logic Apps
- Azure Automation Runbooks
- Azure Resource Graph (mostly around policies, compliance and monitoring)
- PowerShell lab work (applying what I learned at MMS)
- Pressure washing. Why not?
- Mountain biking. Where we don’t have any hills, let alone mountains
- Getting outside again
Automation Checklist
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During one of several UAT sessions with one of our clients for whom we build automation tools, we reviewed some of the process workflows. After my double-espresso with mushroom powder voodoo and 10 lb dose of vitamin B12, a thought came to me, actually, after the first thought about going to the bathroom, which was I should jot down some typical questions that help build an automation checklist. In this case, it’s related to user lifecycle processes (onboard, offboard, change):
- Where is the request data coming from? What is the source of authority?
- Will requests trigger the automation, or will it be scheduled (polling)?
- What format will the request be provided?
- Does each workflow get a unique request type?
- Is the CSV, JSON or XML valid?
- Are all the tags/elements/values populated?
- Are all the values validated? How?
- Do the names (first, last, middle, etc.) have diacritics or accents? (e.g. Latin, Unicode, etc.)
- Do the ID numbers have the correct length and format? (think regex)
- Is the email address valid? (regex again, maybe)
- Does the proposed username (SamAccountName/UPN) exist in the target realm? (AD, AzureAD)
- What request information is provided, and what must be derived?
- What information will be derived from group-based keys (department, title, location, etc.)?
- Is the proposed password provided in the XML?
- Is the proposed password valid for the target realms?
- What logging, alerting and reporting requirements are there?
- Who needs to be alerts and when?
- How will alerts be routed?
- What privacy/sensitivity rules must be followed?
- What resources will need to be accessed by service accounts or service principals? (File shares, REST endpoints, services, processes, WMI, registry keys, ServiceNow, Okta, Workday, ConfigMgr/MEM, etc.)
- What permissions do the various service accounts or service principals need to each resource?
- How will you handle interrupted workflows (resume after failures, etc.)?
- What kinds of maintenance tasks need to be included?
- What is the hand-off process (who will manage it after implementation)?
- Who will “own” the process and related resources?
This is really only about half of the checklist. Thankfully, most of the technical aspects are covered by the automation platform itself, which I only support a small piece of (the rest is managed by a team of geniuses like this guy)
Don’t Forget About User Groups!
I posted a comment on Twitter about the value of user groups. Not just in-person, but online as well. Some of the replies included names and links I hadn’t heard about. Take a look at that thread and add more if you want.
Books, Blogs and Videos for Nerds Like You
- Practical Automation with PowerShell by Matthew Dowst
- Must Learn KQL: Essential Learning for the Cloud-focused Data Scientist by Rod Trent
- Azure Infrastructure as Code, with ARM templates and Bicep by Henry Been, Eduard Keilholz, and Erwin Staal
- Call REST API’s with Invoke-RestMethod in PowerShell by Adam Driscoll (Channel)
- Do you have a suggestion? Mention it on Twitter
Where Next?
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If you’ve followed my blog for a few years, you probably know what that image above means. If not, well, it refers to moments when my blogging reaches a fork in the road. Get it? ha ha ha (cough cough). Okay, that’s pretty lame.
I’ve taken several sabbaticals in the past, usually from hitting writer’s block. Ironically, as soon as I would claim to be tossing in the towel, that’s when ideas came flooding in again. I don’t know if that will be the case this time, but I feel the need to pause for a bit. I just have too much going on with work, family, house stuff, and so on. I need to refocus and figure out what direction makes sense.
Most of my blogging was done during a period when nobody knew who I really was, from 2007 to 2015 that was kind of the point. My identity was out in 2016 and kind of spread since, which has made it more challenging to really share thoughts openly.
If you’ve ever been to an MMS event, you know that a major reason that sessions are not recorded is to foster an open discussion without fear of (employer) reprisal. I’ve always made sure to obfuscate names/places to avoid offending or embarrassing anyone. However, the kind of humor I’ve grown up with isn’t viewed the same today, and that makes it more stressful, and since I don’t earn any money from this blog, it’s hard to justify managing that added stress.
Part of me feels that just writing this is silly. It is about blogging and social media, after all, and not about curing cancer or ending poverty. I’m sure the planet will continue spinning.
Stay healthy. Stay weird. Stay to help others.