Returning from MMS

Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) is a great place to learn about the great new products and features that Microsoft is making available, especially System Center products. There are a lot of great sessions that I would have loved to have gone to including several for Orchestrator, System Center Ops Manager, Configuration Manager, Server Manager, and PowerShell to name a few. However,  there were several sessions that our group put on which we had to prepare for. It always amazes me how much work goes into putting together a presentation especially when one of the pieces required for a key demo gets corrupted and requires you to rebuild everything from scratch.

While at MMS, Chris Adams and I presented Package Conversion Manager (PCM)  “BG03 – Converting Your Existing Software Packages into the Configuration Manager 2012 Application Model”. Besides getting sick and presenting with a temperature in the hundreds the presentation went fairly well. Well OK maybe I was just delirious from my temperature. There were several questions asked during the presentation, but the main one seemed to be whether or not we can help with software that is wrapped in a custom installer. I will be answering this question as well as giving a high level overview of Package Conversion Manager in a future blog post. Overall we got some really good feedback. We also met up with a couple of TAP customers who are interested in PCM who also gave us some great insight on how they package their software and how they setup their collections. This really helped us learn how we can build PCM more effectively for customers.

For those TAP customer’s we interfaced with I will be sending you our CTP1 of PCM shortly. For those TAP customers that are interested in PCM, ask your product group representative and we should be able to get our CTP 1 to you. For those that are not TAP customers and who are interested in PCM, we hope to make our CTP 2 available from the Microsoft Connect site as soon as it is available.

Oh, and one more thing: I will continue to post OSD specific content on this blog, but because I will be posting content around Package Conversion Manager I figure I better change up the title to be less OSD specific. Hopefully I can find a good title to fit the blog, but in the meantime I will simply change cravings of OSD out for cravings of System Center.