This was a big day for the conference. All classes, basically all day. I was excited to see some good sessions, and for the most part it was good.

After eating our free breakfast (we got this because of internet problems the first night in the hotel), we headed over to the Moscone Center. Lisa’s conference started at the same time so she headed over to the West building and I over to the South building. The South building is actually the one that everyone sees online with all the pictures of the banners and such.

I headed to the opening MacIT session ‘Why Companies are Switching’, which was basically the stories of 4 companies and how they are switching to macs at their companies. Two of the peopler were Mac Evangelists telling us how to convert our companies, including techniques such as “install them in small areas where you won’t get arguments.” Personally, that seemed odd for this session. The other two were much more interesting to listen to. The first was a guy who was in process of switching his Macs to avoid paying Microsoft CALs. Its a rather large company, one that M$ has written up in its trade magazines. This was a switch to Mac built on real business reasons. It was good to hear that. The most interesting was that he believes many corporations are allowing their users to choose their computer platform. It was interesting to hear him say that when thats what we have been doing at SLU A&S for a while. All in all, the session got better as it went on. Oh…btw it was so full we were in an overflow room next door listening to the sound and watching the powerpoint. Oh…the other btw, the last presenter was from Carnival Cruise lines speaking about how they will be using macs all over their next gen cruise ship for entertainment and information kiosks.

After the session I headed down to the Expo floor. The first booth is of course Apple’s. Check out these pictures for the Air:

Yes, thats Macbook Airs hanging from a cord, hanging from the ceiling. It was a good way to show how light they are. Theres also a gigantic table where people can get their hands on the machines and actually run it through their first looks.

One of the biggest things announced at the Expo are in the world of virtualizations. Both VMWare and Paralells announced support for virtualized MacOS X server. I’m not sure how we would use this, but with 8 cores on the shipping XServes, theres got to be something we could do. Hopefully I can get a demo in for this.

The sessions after lunch were good to. I started attending a session on scripting, but about 15 minutes in I realized that I wasn’t going to get much of this session, so I headed over to one about Filewave and how two different guys are using itl I left wanting to buy Filewave or Casper Suite, or some other system that will keep the machines up to date. I think I may try and pursue these larger items over the radmind stuff that we have been working on for a while. One problem with coming to the session late, all the seats were full.

My final session though was once again overflowing with people. this is a problem on their logistics staff.. Its got to be worked on. There are just some major logistics problems going on here. In any case the session was basically about Mac Management. You’re probably sensing a theme here. And you are right, I’m prepping for SLU to get going on the Mac Management project that has been on the table for a while. This one was again good. It started with the two guys from afp548 talking about InstaDMG. This is basically something to streamline the creation of your base image for macs. This is definitely something we need to adopt. There are a lot of reasons to do this, and its something that should help us speed up evaluation and support of new machines. 0It also went into the other parts of lifecycle management. For instance I didn’t know Apple added asset tags and would image your machines with your own image. Its pretty cool that they can come ready to go. Something to look up when I get back. The other stuff was about mcx and the beauty of this stuff. We really need to do this.

Well, thats it for today. We went over and got our last dinner in San Fran. Lisa heads out tomorrow afternoon for St. Louis and needed to start packing. Its been a fun trip for the two of us, but its starting to wind down.   Macworld is an experience. If you are a mac person, figure out how to come someday. Its pretty cool to watch. That, and its in San Fran.