SpiceWorld Day 2
Another interesting day at SpiceWorld. Sat through the morning session about IT Policies and I’m not going to lie, got a good nap in during that one. As necessary as they are it would take an amazing speaker to make it interesting!! The guys here were good, but not up to that monumental task.
Next session I attended was the JEA from Jeffrey Snover. Great session talking about “Just Enough Administration” and how this is now possible with the tool sets provided by PowerShell. As with most security measures it’s only as good as the effort you put into it–which in my experience often means no one does much with it at all. As it stands it’s a great idea and the functionality is there, but I doubt it will be widely adopted. The reason is everything is custom, you create your custom tool sets with custom permissions and then override, or “proxy” known PowerShell cmdlet’s with your requirements. What I mean by that is you can actually modify Restart-Computer with a custom validation set so someone using that toolset could only restart Server1 and Server3, but would be unable to touch Server2. Cool stuff, but honestly seems impractical at this juncture. Once some easier interfaces, templates, etc start being available I believe you’ll see this take off.
After that I went to the Windows 2012 Deduplication session. This was put on by a Veeam employee, but he took great pains to make sure we understood he was doing this as an enthusiast and not a speaker from Veeam. He was very successful. Great session and really highlighted the insane compression ratios possible with Windows 2012 in the proper circumstances. In this case the massive backup files created by Veeam backup software. Ninety-four percent? Are you insane?! Couldn’t wait to take that back to the office.
After that just visited a few vendors, then sat through the raffle. This was a lot of fun as you had to be in the room when the raffle called your name. If you weren’t your ticket was put into the shredder to chants of “Shred it! Shred it!” and the crowd was out for blood.
Kris Bushover also put on his yearly presentation of the best tickets his department received from Spiceworkers. Most of them were pretty terrified of this particular presentation, but it’s all in good fun and great for a laugh.
After that was a after-party there in the convention center which was essentially a last chance to catch up and visit with everyone, new and old friends alike. Then a few of us met up with the community managers over at Champions, but Vegas rules were in effect so can’t say anything more. Although I did find out what camel case meant, thanks Justin.
Great time, and the PowerShell session was so much fun to put on I just love doing it. Not sure if I’ll be able to go back next year as it’s a very expensive trip and I had to foot the entire bill. I will try.
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