Well, its a been a bit of time since my last blog post and this being the 1st of May, I thought I would take the opportunity to write a new entry. The last few weeks have been busy. As I’ve already mentioned, we released our Desktop Policy Manager product in early April. Then I was at the MVP Summit in Redmond. That was very cool. Of course, all the details are NDA, but its a great opportunity for MVPs to have in-depth discussions with product teams and this year was no exception. The Group Policy product team is full of some really smart, energetic folks with lots of cool ideas. This is always a good environment in which to share thoughts and brainstorm on the technology and there was plenty of that. And even though I probably used up my allocated talking time (its hard to shut me up once I get going) I found the whole week to be very useful.

The following week I took a much needed vacation, visiting the Central Coast of California. If you ever get a chance to spend time in this area, its definitely worth it. Much less crowded than Los Angeles, but with some good beaches and even better, some great wineries. We managed to visit quite a few of the latter, and since wines are a bit of a hobby/obsession for me, it was an opportunity to sample some new wines. One of my favorite wineries, and one that should not be missed, is a winery called Linne Calodo. They specialize in Zinfandel and Rhone blends and while their wines are a bit on the pricey side, they were incredible. Other wineries that I really enjoyed include Four Vines and Tablas Creek. Four Vines got the prize for most interesting labels. Their wines had names like Naked Chardonnay, Heretic and Anarchy. Cool.

Yesterday I spent a quick day at the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) in Las Vegas, which is usually about as much Vegas as I can handle. It was a great opportunity to meet with folks and I got to see old friends that I don’t get to visit with very often, like the guys at SpecOps (my favorite Group Policy vendor…well besides SDM Software <g>)– many of whom live in Sweden and don’t get a chance to get over here very often–as well as the folks at Netpro.

MMS is always a good show for showcasing Microsoft’s latest management technology and this show was no exception. And while I did not attend any talks, I did hear the buzz about the new System Center Virtual Machine Manager product that is in development and was demo’d at the show, as well as general directions for the System Center product line. PowerShell was also prominently discussed and I heard that every attendee got a PowerShell book in their show bag!

Well since this is a Group Policy blog, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention *something* about Group Policy. I’m working on an update to our GPMC cmdlets to add support for some of the new features introduced in Server 2008, like Starter GPOs and GPO comments. Keep an eye out on this blog for an update when its finished!

 

Tags:

Group Policy, PowerShell, Linne Calodo, MMS, Desktop Policy Manager