Some Thoughts on Ignite 2019: Excited about the future of IT
A week back from Microsoft Ignite I cannot help, but feel excited about the future of IT. I work for a small college within a much larger university and came from a small company where I wore [and currently wear many hats]. I’m junior system engineer, endpoint support, AV technician, video streamer, personnel counselor, cyber-security agent, SharePoint wizard, furniture mover, smartphone migrator, tablet helper, and educator. I do whatever people need me to do and I am stretched thin a lot of the time. I am skilled at many things, but master of none. It’s taken me a little while to get over the feeling that I’m always behind. I keep on top of things, but when you work for a small college at a large state institution you definitely get the feeling that Rome wasn’t built in a day, so I just work on many projects at one times instead of laser-focusing my attention on one or two at a time like I did when I worked at a small company. One of my last things I attended the last day of Ignite was a talk titled “The Death of the IT Professional”, an ominous title for a 9am talk on a Friday morning after a late-night at Harry Potter world. The talk really summed up my feelings towards the trajectory of the IT industry in general. I like working in IT and always have. Helping people with computers or software brings me an immense amount of joy when I can improve their days by helping them with a tricky problem at work, helping them back up their family photos, and otherwise letting them get back to doing what they enjoy doing the most. I have always envied my peers who have specialized in stuff like Windows Server or Networking or Coding. Their jobs always seem way cooler than mine, but at the end of the day I think it works out. If I had specialized in Exchange server or VMWare I would probably be out of a job, especially in the Southeast where IT jobs are rare. Instead of fearing change, I try to embrace it and my changing role as an IT professional. I just want to provide the best experience to the people I support.
Here are a few things I’m excited about going forward
Microsoft Edge: I use Apple hardware, but as a Windows Administrator I’m happy going forward to have one less reason to install Chrome on my endpoints. I think the new Edge (Based on Chromium), is a much better browser and will be one less thing to patch going forward. I’m going to make Chrome available via Intune and Configuration Manager of course if people want it they can get it, but Edge will make my base install smaller. The ability to run legacy Internet Explorer 7 apps in the new Edge makes me excited as well, hopefully this should reduce support calls. Also, as somebody who works in SharePoint its much nicer to develop PowerApps with Edge than Safari on the Mac and I like how it will sync bookmarks and tabs across my PC and Mac natively now.
SharePoint: This year we migrated my college over to SharePoint online and I could not be happier. Right now I am developing a Thesis database with PowerApps and Power Automate (Previously Microsoft Flow). The system is very easy to work with, but immensely powerful. I also love that the new SharePoint is integrated with Microsoft Teams, which we’re pushing a lot going forward. I’m particularly interested in the new SharePoint News sites and organizing our SharePoint around the Hub site concept so that we can have an unified experience, but individual colleges can have their own SharePoint experiences tailored to them.
Teams: For the last three years Microsoft Teams has definitely been the highlight of Ignite and it shows. I’m excited about Microsoft Whiteboard and To-Do integration as well as the ability to interoperate with Zoom and Cisco WebEx. We have been using Teams for the last two years internally in IT and going forward I’m going to actively push it more to faculty and staff as a more modern way to get work done. I’m particularly interested in introducing Teams to our students as a more modern way to collaborate than email or GroupMe.
Azure Virtual Desktop: This looks like an awesome new service It’s affordable, very easy to set-up, and the performance appears to be there. The service is very bare bones (More Powershell is required than a typical Azure offering), but so far we have been really impressed with it in our testing. I think that Azure Virtual Desktop with its GPU support and the fact that is functions as essentially a local domain-joined machine on our network that we can leverage our current knowledge and infrastructure while possibly replacing our physical labs, thus freeing up a ton of time for our endpoint support specialists to focus more on the user-experience of other tasks. I just love the idea that we can provide a consistent and powerful application experience to our faculty and students and it not matter what computer they are using, as long as they have a modern browser or something that runs the Microsoft Desktop Client application (Mac or PC) they can run Azure Virtual Desktop applications. It won’t matter if a student has a $300 Chromebook or a $3,000 MacBook Pro, they’ll all have the same applications and the same performance. The consistency will make it easier for professors to focus on teaching instead of worrying about which version of Creative Cloud a student has. I like the idea that I can get a list of the applications we need from the professors we need every semester and just publish them to Azure Virtual Desktop.
Microsoft Endpoint Manager: Intune and Configuration Manager finally merge into a more coherent offering this year and I cannot be more excited. They are essentially two sides of the same coin so we can continue to use our SCCM instance to maintain our servers, but also use it to maintain our endpoints. My boss can continue to use SCCM that he has been building up lately and myself will keep pushing into the web interface. I’m very excited that we can continue to use our SCCM instance and the same tools will be showing up in the web. That’s one of the things I really like about Microsoft is they recognize that not everything can be in the cloud , but they do a good job at building bridges to the cloud if you want to do that. I’m hoping to use the web interface myself going forward, but I’m just as excited about them supporting configuration manager. I’m looking forward to sinking my teeth deeper into that going forward, particularly the bring your own devices scenario that I could offer up applications in an University Portal for faculty, staff, and students to download instead of having to constantly hand-touch their machines. It should make it easier for all involved have the most up-to-date applications and end-users can download them at their own leisure instead of having to be at the college and be able to grab me or one of our other IT support staff.
PowerShell: This continues to excite me, especially with the session that I attended it that showed it off running on MacOS and Linux with the same power that you get on a Windows machine. I wish there an iPadOS application, that would be pretty cool. I want to get more into scripting and I’m hoping that as we use Endpoint Manager and Azure services more it will free more time up for me to automate more annoying parts of my job. I love that I don’t have to run a Windows machine remotely or in virtualization to use PowerShell.
Windows Server Admin Center: This is essentially removing the need for me to install RSAT tools on my management box going forward. In fact, I think I may try to build a headless management box going forward. I love that I can manage Windows servers (And clients!) from a modern HTML5 interface from any modern web browser. I could manage a server on my iPad Pro or even a Chromebook now!
Overall, I’m really excited about my time at Microsoft Ignite. I wish I could have had another day or so at the conference, but continue to watch the sessions I missed in my free time. There are so many things I’m excited to leverage for my people that I support going forward. There’s a lot more I could write about of course. If you couldn’t attend or are interested in watching the session you can get to them here
