Well today was the last day that Lisa would be in San Francisco. I have to admit,  its a little sad to see this adventure ending. Sure its work, I’m attending conferences for 7 hours a day, thinking about work, or how to best do the work we do…but its still a departure from everyday life. Its been nice to walk to the conference, or at the worst walk out the door to take the cable car over to fisherman’s wharf for dinner. I make it sound like I didn’t love it…thats not true though. This was a great conference, and it was a great place  to have a conference. But its coming to an end. Anyway…the sessions were good today. I started going to the David Pogue: Live show which was basically David interviewing different people. That was fun, not really much learning but fun. The most notable person interviewed was the head of the MacBU. Interesting tidbit: the head of the MacBU admitted they cut features to make it to the market when they did. Its not the final feature set they wanted. Thats kinda weird to hear, and a rather blatant admission. After playing with Office, I can see some of the features I would have liked, CalDav support, the ability to move the templates bar from the top to the side, and support for VBscript in Macros. But overall it looks like a good product. One note, David had people on the stage who were self-confessed Mac Addicts. The two most memorable were the guy who has over 150 macs in his room in a self described Macca, and the lady who instead of exchanging rings at their wedding exchanged iPod nanos. Oh dear…weird folks. The session I went to was on Puppet. This cool technology would allow us to manage macs immediately with no support fees like Filewave would. Its kinda convoluted, but is still rather simple compared to Radmind. We need to examine what we could do with both, but if we can get funding, Filewave has my endorsement, but at over $4000 annual, I wonder if we can get it done. Puppet has the unique potential of managing faculty macs. I’d call it similar to Patchlink. Did I mention its free? But it will take a while to get up to speed for all of us. FYI..Google is managing 5000 computers  with it, 6 months after deciding to do it. Looks like it has potential. After that Lisa and I got lunch and she headed off to the airport. I headed to the Directory Services Session. There’s definitely a lot we could do with all of this. So this too needs to figure in. And the final session was on Lucid Systems Administration. This could have more aptly been titled Doing your job and not going crazy while doing it. She had some good information on how to better  manage your time. Got some good ideas.. and I’ve decided I’ve got to do something to better manage my time/tasks/demands.This evening I was invited to my first party, interestingly enough for Filewave. I sat next to guys from MTV and HBO and they told me how are using this product. Really has some potential. So after 4 days of conferences, countless conversations, and research on different solutions, I think I’ve got a refinement of our Mac management process:

1. Build an image for the machines with InstaDMG
2. Restore the image with NetRestore or work with Apple to get the image preloaded (yes, you can do that).
3. Install the software needed using either:
   1. Filewave or a similar product if we can get the funding.
   2. Puppet if we cannot.
4. Manage the machines with the same technology.

All in all, for SLU sending me out here to get better ideas on managing, I think they got their monies worth. Now we’ll see if we can find the resource to implement it. So yeah…I’m sad that this is my last night in San Fran. In some ways I’m ready to head back home…but this surreal experience is  great. I loved living in Europe  because I could take the train or walk everywhere, the weather was always good. In many ways, its similar to San Fran. But I’m ready to head home in some ways. So tommorrow I get up, pack, and head to the conference for the final sessions and time on the exhibit floor. If I can get to the session on Server Virtualization, that should be a good one, if not, the one on protecting machines in an educational environment will have to  suffice. One more day, and two more good sessions.