Justin Kallas, Lead Solutions Analyst at ITS, is spending this week immersed in technology and training at Microsoft Headquarters via The TechMentor conference.
The TechMentor conference is held twice per year and brings in various experts from the IT community to provide up to date training for IT professionals. Generally it is held in the Fall at Microsoft Headquarters and then again in the Winter at varying locations. I have attended twice before (both times in Las Vegas) in 2005 and 2008. This will be my first time attending at Microsoft Headquarters. The nice thing about attending in Redmond is that a handful of the speakers will be Microsoft employees who can provide more insight into some of their core service offerings. My schedule will include courses offered by a few third party independent consultants as well as Microsoft employees. Some of the courses I am most excited about are:
Linux OS Fundamentals for the Windows Admin – Looks at Powershell and SQL Server for Linux now that both are available and how to incorporate them into the data center/hosting environment.
Remote Desktop Services in Windows Server 2016 – Looks at the new features of Remote Desktop in Server 2016 and outlines limitations and drawbacks compared to Citrix.
Windows PowerShell Module Administration and PackageManagement – Looks at creating PowerShell commands and storing them in modules for future usage, best practices for PowerShell library management, etc. This one will be led by one of Microsoft’s own Field Engineers so should have a lot of good info about PowerShell.
Why Group Policy Isn’t Dead, Still Matters, and What’s New in Group Policy for Windows 10 – Will look at the new features in Group Policy for Windows 10 and will look at where Microsoft is going with Group Policy for both on-premise and cloud solutions.
Top Windows Server 2016 and Windows 10 Gotchas – Looks at the new features of Windows 10 and Server 2016, goes over Microsoft’s new update plans (IE: new releases of Windows 10 such as the Creators Update, Fall Creators Update, etc.), what happens to the user during the version to version Windows 10 updates, etc.
Also of note is a Keynote presentation being given by Microsoft’s Director of Product Marketing on what is new in terms of deployment solutions for Windows 10, the tools and services available for deploying Windows 10, and an overview of Windows as a Service.