MacSysAdmin 2018

Last week, James and Ben were in attendance at MacSysAdmin 2018.

The conference, hosted in Göteborg, Sweden, consisted of talks and presentations given by people directly connected with Apple technology and the range of topics covered was wide and varied. The speakers had been carefully selected by the organisers, meaning each presenter was exceptionally knowledgeable and highly experienced in their individual field.

Each talk was filmed and, as soon as one finished, the audio-visual team released the video so they could be watched again. All the talks and presentations from the conference can be found here.

Ben, our technical director, presented on macOS Mojave, with a focus on the changes to transparency, consent and control within the new Privacy Preferences Policy Control payloads. These are new privacy features which have arrived late into the beta cycle of macOS Mojave.

You can find the link to Ben’s talk on the page mentioned above, or use a this direct link: Mucking about with Mojave

Not only was Ben presenting, but he and his blog (macmule.com) were both mentioned in a number of other talks. Two of which are detailed below.

“Enterprise Management of Office for Mac” from Olof Hellman, Microsoft.

Microsoft’s goal is to make deploying, updating and configuring Office straightforward for enterprise admins. The reality of this is, with Office, Mac admins face far more complicated scenarios and Ben recently blogged about this. During Olof’s talk at the conference, he highlighted Ben’s post and thanked him for it.

During Tim Sutton of Sauce Labs talk: “Riding Your Next Mac Admin Wave,” he looked at technical skill, with the Mac being as important as ever. Tim talked of how those who also understand concepts and patterns from the rest of the computing space are usually the most successful. He detailed how solutions are developed and gave an example from Ben’s blog on the evolution of ADPassmon to NoMAD and now Jamf Connect.