MacTech Conference November 9, 2013 at 3:19 pm

MacTech Conference 2013 Wrapup

MacTech Conference 2013 has concluded for the year with the last session ending around 5pm on Friday. The conference ended strong with many great IT/Dev track sessions in the morning and several general sessions in the afternoon. Tom Bridge’s session on Hacking your Users was a fantastic look at how you should relate to your customers in a positive way. Various types of users were discussed with strategies for working with each type. For example, if you have a customer who knows just enough to be dangerous, your job is to teach them how to be less dangerous and shepherd them in the right direction while providing some safety nets to protect them from themselves. One of the main points in Tom’s talk was that User Education is more important than User Control and we should always strive to empower our users rather than control them. The next session in the IT Track was Nick McSpadden on iOS Deployment and Management strategies. Nick shared several tools of the trade for getting massive amounts of iOS devices configured, managed and out the door. Nick also covered changes to VPP and the new method for deploying apps to personal AppleIDs with the option to revoke the app later and bring it back into your VPP pool. If you have deployed or need to deploy iOS devices in your organization, then check out the slides and/or video for it. The last IT track session of the day was Sam Keeley on Security in Mavericks. Sam covered the changes to /etc/authoriztion (now /var/db/auth.db) and how you can go about editing those settings now that it is a SQLite3 database. Sam also discussed some general philosophy regarding security and when it is most appropriate to lock things down. MacTech ended with some general sessions, including Kelly Guimont going over Community Hacking, which was based upon her experience building the AppCamp4Girls group. Andy Ihnatko closed out MacTech Conference 2013 with a talk on devices as they exist today and where he believes they will be going in the future (hint: Expect more iOS devices/form factors and Cloud-focused devices). MacTech Conference was a solid conference this year and I would highly suggest going in 2014. For more information on the MacTech Conference  scheduled for next year, see the Early Registration page.

Nate Walck

Nate is a Systems Reliability Engineer at Dropbox, Inc in San Francisco, CA. He runs afp548.com along with Sam Keeley and is one of the founding members of the ##osx-server IRC channel on freenode.net. He loves being involved in the Mac Admin community and using Open Source projects whenever possible, especially Munki, The Luggage and Puppet.

More Posts

Follow Me:
Twitter

Leave a reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.