Vancouver - Fall Tour Day 7

Can you top this? - over 550 people came along to my presentations! One thing I also find on the West coast is that the people are so great. You know as I traverse Canada and visit many cities and speak to literally thousands of people I am always amazed at welcoming and friendly Canadians are. It really re-affirms why I moved to the country.

Those who came along will know that I changed the content of one of the presentations based on the amazing feedback from Calgary and Edmonton. The Security Risk Management presentation was replaced by 'Defense in Depth Against Malicious Software (Malware)'. From talking to you all, this changed seemed to get a very positive reponse. For all of you that would still like to hear / see the Security Risk Management presentaion, I will be doing a live webcast version, so watch this blog and the TechNet Canada community page for details..

Many of you have been asking for the presentation URL's.. I have been chasing for them to be posted, please watch this space. I will put the links on my blog as soon as I have them.

..And onwards to Victoria. See you all again soon.

Comments

• Anonymous
  November 03, 2004
  We're waiting! (in Victoria, I mean :)
• Anonymous
  November 03, 2004
  Go Canada!!!
• Anonymous
  November 04, 2004
  I came late at that day so I had to sit at the second cinema to watch you on the screen, not real you :). The presentation is great, showed a lot of useful information. Unfortunatly, I missed the afternoon session but I have downloaded the presentation from the link you provided.
  
  I have got one question in my mind for a long time regarding SUS and Goup Policy. I installed SUS on one of my server and everything is running pretty well. But when I decided to configure Group Policy to start rolling this out, I found the templates we should use for Automatic Update was missing on almost all of the workstations. The question is if there is an easy way to enable it on every workstation so that I don't have to go every workstation physically to get it enabled. I love the SUS idea and love the way how Group Policy handles the deployment. But it sounds stupid if we have to go each of the workstation to enable the templates first.
  
  Thanks, Kent
• Anonymous
  November 08, 2004
  Bruce,
  
  You mentioned an MSI packaging tool that I could download from the Microsoft Site to repackage .exe files for GPO distribution.
  
  Could you post that link?
  
  Regards,
  Ian
• Anonymous
  November 10, 2004
  Kent Chen you don't mention what OS your clients are running. Are your computers in an OU, and the group policy is applied to that OU? The template is only a pretty user interface shown to the administrator, it only controls what registry changes that Group Policy will apply. The workstations don't need the templates. The easiest way to troubleshoot SUS is to check your IIS logs. You can also check c:windowswindowsupdate.log on each client.
  
  Computers where Automatic Update is already included in the operating system:
  Windows 2000, Service Pack 3 or above.
  Windows XP, Service Pack 1 or above.
  Windows Server 2003.
  
  Computers where a separate Automatic Update client installation is required:
  Windows 2000, Service Pack 2.
  Windows XP, no Service Pack.
  
• Anonymous
  November 10, 2004
  I found that the presentation was lacking in any technical detail. You did not touch on the deployment of XP SP2 by customizing netfw.inf as I had hoped, and the majority of the presentation was hogged by people making useless comments/questions about "their experiences". It seemed like this entire presentation was aimed for the home user who wanted to come in and get a free coffee and breakfast as opposed to the IT community. SUS SP1 has been out for over a year now, and we had to go over how to install and configure it. You touched on importing the ADM files into the Group Policy Management Console, but did not copy them to the %WINDIR%INF directory, so group policy results wouldn't have been displayed properly. We had to discuss setting up a basic group policy.. The list goes on and on. I will not be attending the next TechNET tour, as it wasn't worth the free t-shirt.
• Anonymous
  November 10, 2004
  Jeff,
  
  I would be really interested to find out from you where specifically you think we could improve. Essentially with a large audience it is often difficult to cater for a broad range of interests and technical levels. So specifically I would be interested to find out if you think more technical conversations are needed and perhaps we could work towards providing these.
  
  Please feel free to contact me via the blog or directly by email if you have my address. I look forward to speaking to you soon.
  
  Bruce
• Anonymous
  November 10, 2004
  The biggest thing that I would change is to have a Q&A session afterwards or during the breaks, and not during presentations. 95% of the comments and questions were made by home users that wanted to hear their own voice, and possibly impress someone in the process. The problem was that they simply did not know the products, or thought that their trivial experiences were unique.
  
  I hoped you would have spoken more about upcoming technologies (WUS as opposed to SUS for example). The presentation spent too much time on things that people have been doing for years that there are documents all over the internet for(such as slipstreaming an OS) and not enough time on upcoming technologies, or even recent technologies.
  
  You talked about deploying XP through conventional means: SUS, Group Policy, Slipstream, standard single download. Things that most people have done many times by now.
  
  One of the key reasons I attended was because I have to package SP2 and ship to satellite offices, and have been having difficulties with the netfw.inf method. Granted mine is a unique problem, but it is a method of deploying SP2, and was not even mentioned.
  
  Who is the TechNET Tour aimed at? Home users, Industry Professionals, MCSE's, etc? I went on blind faith, and didn't do a lot of reading into the Tour other than skimming the agenda which looked good.
  
  I also have to admit that I left after the XP SP2 talk, so I can't speak about the rest of the day. I was interested to hear about Risk Management, but when it was switched to "malware" (which is again more of a home or small business issue) I was further turned off the conference.
• Anonymous
  November 15, 2004
  Jeff,
  
  I really appreciate the feedback.
  
  There are a number of changes we are planning for the TechNet tours next year. Firstly the idea is to get as many partners involved in the presentations to address the real world issues you are facing. This should also help with the technical level as well. Another change is to be able to change the material slightly for each city we visit. As you can imagine, the attendees in Victoria may have a different level and focus from Vancouver and Toronto for example. As I get to know the audiences better and their requirements, it makes it easier for me to put over the most relavent information.
  
  As this was my first tour, I presented the level information based on talking to people as the day went on, so I hope that for the next tour you and others can help guide me better.
  
  The Security Risk Management Discipline presentation was changed due to feedback from 2 previous cities and is being provided as online sessions, with Q&A facilities.
  
  If you would like to find out more, I have posted links on this blog, but please feel free to contact me directly.
  
  Many Thanks
  
  Bruce
• Anonymous
  November 30, 2004
  Jeff, thanks for your suggestion for solving my problems.
  
  I felt I was so stupid after I discovered the problem. Actually, the problem is not anything about templates. It is just because the anonymous access was off by default while I installed the Windows 2003 server. Of course, the workstations couldn't communicate with the server because they don't have the rights.
  
  Thanks Bruce and Jeff for helping me solve this problem. Hope you two all the best,
  
  Kent
  kentjchen@yahoo.ca