The Business Case for AI Image Generation

The boss has just asked you to update the company's Word and PowerPoint templates with the new logo. Also, Billy has left the team, and his face needs to be removed from the group photo. Billy was also the only guy in the team with Photoshop skills...

Which tools do you use? How much time will you spend learning new skills just to do this task once or twice? Can AI really create images at a quality good enough for business use?

Come find out in this playful and energetic hands-on session! You will learn about commercial and free-to-use tools. What works, what doesn't (yet).

We're not creating memes and Ghibli images of ourselves in this session. We're trying to sell it to the boss that we need €20 credits per month so we can create more business value! Or that's how we'll pitch it anyways ;)

Monitor your Intune managed Windows devices with Endpoint Analytics, Azure and PowerShell

Have you seen our sessions on Endpoint Analytics and using PowerShell with Graph? Let's take it a step further.
This time, we'll show you how to send notifications when devices are bluescreening. Or any other trigger event.
We will give you all the building blocks, step by step, to be able to monitor your Windows clients in ways that the Intune console can't.

Microsoft Dev Box - Make The Devs AND Security Teams happy

Meet Dave, the Dev. Dave has been using a powerful laptop to run VMs on so he can do his work. Now Security Steve has told him they're no longer putting up with his 'against policy' methods and he needs to use VDI like everyone else. On the same host with everyone else... Dave is now complaining about slow performance, not having the tools he needs, and having only 1 session at the time. Poor Dave :(

There's a way to make both Dave and Steve happy! Introducing Microsoft Dev Box! We will discuss how this compares to other options, including Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD), and why it is the better choice for organizations looking to provide their developers with a secured, self-service platform.

Let's build our own "Copilot" for Intune

What if we had a simple, low-cost AI solution that can help Intune admins? Call it "Copilot for Intune"

Come see how we've built an AI assistant that helps us to find what policies or settings we need to configure on managed endpoints, based on the Intune documentation. We will show you how you can do it yourself for the cost of a coffee or less, and particularly, how to avoid AI from messing with your tenant and devices 😉

Let's Build More Community Tools!

Have you noticed how many new community tools were released recently? We used to only have a handful tools, like the Driver Automation Tool, PSADT and OSD Cloud, to name a few. Often built by a small team of PowerShell scripters or coders.

Did we suddenly get a lot of new developers in our community? Well yes. In the form of AI coding assistants. And those who know how to use them! Are you not one of them? Never fear, Merlin is here! I started coding with AI 3 years ago and I'll show you real examples of how to start coding without knowing how to code.

Let's look at what it takes to build a simple tool that can reduce your workload and do some of the repetitive tasks that you hate doing. We'll start with an idea and an AI chatbot like Copilot or ChatGPT. Then we'll switch to VS Code with Github Copilot and other IDEs like Cursor and Windsurf to write and test actual code.

Our goal is to help you code time-saving tools for yourself, your team, and maybe the entire IT community!

Join me in learning all about Copilot Studio

I've recently completed the Microsoft Learn challenges about Copilot Studio. It's actually really cool how you can use a simple chat with AI to code your own team solutions!

I'll compare it with other tools such as the Power Platform and third-party solutions.

Is it easier to learn PowerShell today than it was when I did? (thanks to AI)

I started with PowerShell 2.0. I don't really remember anything specifically hard. I just thought it was a cool way to script and better than .cmd and .cmd files. Let alone .vbs ;)

But I found I have a real nack at learning code languages, more than many others in IT. And I can't really explain why. But then, I also pick up languages quite easily and am very good at them. Could it be related? After all, generative AI, is all about language. Just look at how much that can help us now!

So I wonder, if I were to learn PowerShell today from scratch, would I progress more with ChatGPT and Github Copilot? I'll relate to my learning Python that way, but will also share results from interviews with IT peers. And with people in the field of education, on how they apply AI in teaching today and the near future.

How I Survive a 4-day Conference as an Introvert

After attending many international conferences, big and small, as an attendee and speaker alike, but mostly as an introvert, I can tell you a thing or two about what to do and not to do to survive up to a week at a highly energetic community event.

Key take-aways:
Pre-Conference Planning: Strategies for selecting sessions, networking goals, and setting personal boundaries.
Energy Management: Discuss the importance of scheduled breaks, finding quiet zones, and the balance between socializing and solitude.
Networking for Introverts: Tips on how to initiate and maintain meaningful connections without feeling overwhelmed.
Personal anecdotes with a humouristic and humble twist.

Everything You Need to Know About Which LLM Models Are Best For You and How to Run Them

Through my own learning experience and real-world use cases, I aim to demonstrate what specific Large Language Models can do to advance your coding efforts.

For example, most LLMs have been trained on similar datasets, and some have been trained extra on coding and instructions. These would focus on Python, C++, React, and some PowerShell as well. You'll get some pretty good results from a small(ish) model running on an Nvidia RTX 4090 with 16GB RAM like in my laptop.

But that model won't be very good at writing proper SQL queries for instance. It also won't know how to talk to an API developed within your organization. There are certain models that can suit your needs. And there are ways that you can train a model to get you great results. And it's not rocket science!

I would know, cause I haven't been able to build a rocket. Maybe next year ;)

Kusto for ConfigMgr admins

What do CM Pivot, MDATP and Azure Monitoring have in common? And why would you care?

If you're using any of the above, you're using Kusto. In this demo-filled session, I'll show you how the power of Azure is slowly but surely sneaking into your job as a ConfigMgr admin. Get to grips with it and learn how to use it to your advantage.

Take-aways

Kusto is similar to other query languages you already know - it doesn't take much to learn

Learn how Kusto is an important tool in a multidisciplinary IT world

Predict resource usage and ConfigMgr Site health based on current data

Unearth your Intune data

Sometimes you feel that it requires some digging to get the correct data from Intune. Microsoft Endpoint Manager (MEM) admin center is your main tool, but it doesn’t always give you the data you need.

In this session we will cover the following mechanisms:
• How to use MEM portal effectively
• Using Graph & PowerShell to get Intune data
• Integrating Intune with Log Analytics and using KQL queries
• Create PowerBI reports from Intune data

We will provide simple examples so you can easily get started on your own journey to getting the information you really want from Intune.

Pivotal skills for the sysadmin

Let us show you how quick and powerful CMPivot is! We'll get you started on the easy-to-learn syntax and how to use Community Hub to find and share more queries. We will also compare the functionality of CMPivot with the cloud version in MEM Admin Center.

Key take-aways from this session:
- CMPivot tips & tricks for beginners AND experienced users
- what happens behind the scenes of CMPivot?
- we're sharing all the queries we know with you!

Lessons learned from implementing Defender for Endpoint

Throughout the past 2 years, we've done more than a few implementations of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint for Windows and iOS. And now we'd like to share what we've learned. Because we've made mistakes we wouldn't want you to repeat.

After our session, you will walk away with:
- high level design options
- security baselines and policy configurations
- pitfalls during the implementation
- free-to-use reporting templates

How to get more data out of Intune

Intune is a bit of a black box. For reporting, we rely on Microsoft and some great community reports and solutions. Let's look at how to dig a little deeper and what useful data we can find, that isn't exposed by Microsoft.

This is what you'll learn from this session :

- How to use MEM portal effectively
- Using Graph & PowerShell to get Intune data
- Integrating Intune with Log Analytics and using KQL queries
- Create PowerBI reports from Intune data

We will share code samples to help get you started on creating your own custom reports based on Intune data.

How to Become a CMPivot Turbo-Ninja in 60 min!

What do CMPivot, MDATP and Azure Monitoring have in common? Kusto.

This language makes CMPivot a great tool to show almost any kind of information from the managed devices. If you haven't used CMPivot and Kusto a lot, this is an excellent opportunity to learn how use it more efficiently.

The session is demo-only: starting with simple queries and gradually making more advanced queries using the latest CMPivot features.

Don't ask what AdminService can do for you. Ask what you can do with AdminService.

The AdminService is the hottest thing in ConfigMgr since the Fast Channel. Cloud Attach and the promised web console are cool, but do they offer all the features you're waiting for? How about we build them ourselves? Let's find out what we can and can't (yet) do through the AdminService. Most of all, we'll show you the pitfalls. Of which there are plenty!

Take-aways

Learn how to administer the AdminService to better service your admins

Did you know the MEM web consoles actually use AdminService as well?

Walk away with a long list of HTTP requests that you can use today

This will be a very technical session showing off some seriously cool shizzle

How do you feed AI your data without it becoming public?

You know you shouldn't enter private data in ChatGPT, right? So how do you use AI to summarize documents full of corporate secrets and personal data? It's called embedding.
Learn about the options to use data with GPT, Azure or even offline.

AI Ninja School

Come and learn the AI skills you can use in your role as a Workplace Ninja! How can you use (Chat)GPT, GitHub Copilot and some open source tools in your work? Coding, writing docs, reporting and analyzing, and more!

Becoming a PowerShell ConfigMgr Ninja is CIMple!

The ConfigMgr PowerShell cmdlets are cool and all. But they're slow. And they require the ConfigurationManager module. And a user session. Too much!
Be like a PowerShell ninja, sneak past the ConfigurationManager module, enter and leave the SMS Site without leaving a footprint and still get what you want faster than I can spell my own name!
We'll look at connecting to the SMS Provider, not through WMI, but CIM. I'll tell you why and show you the differences. And we'll talk about lazy properties and dynamic methods. Which are not always that CIMple!
You will walk away with new and better methods to script your custom solutions. You will see you won't even have to rewrite most of your scripts and still make them faster and more lightweight.

Endpoint analytics - just use it

Endpoint analytics is a built-in feature of Microsoft Intune that provides organizations with meaningful metrics and insights for measuring the quality of the end-user experience from Windows 10/11 devices. In the session we will cover how easily you can implement it and what information it will provide you.

We will also cover Advanced Endpoint analytics, which is a part of Microsoft Intune Suite and provides more detailed insights from your devices and detects anomalies from your environment.

Welcome to the AIndustry!

AI is having profound impact on industries and households across the board. The release of ChatGPT is considered the "iPhone moment" for AI. Now what can we expect from it as system admins? Should we fear for our jobs too, or is that a worry only for the developers and creative people? Will the products we know simply get better or will we need to learn new skills to stay in the game?

not a technical session, rather a keynote or general talk about AI in our industry

Support session for support groups that support clients through support center

Most MEM admins haven't yet invested more than a few minutes on the new Support Center tool set included with ConfigMgr. Most have only used OneTrace to replace CMTrace - or Notepad, if you're a hipster.

Come spend 45 minutes with us and learn about all the useful tools and options you didn't know were hiding behind that name. about it and make your admin job more efficient. You've no idea what's been hiding in plain sight!

Prevent F12 fatigue! Just go with the Flow.

Using Azure Log Analytics, let's monitor the ConfigMgr server logs and figure out how to fix a broken PXE-booted OSD process, with only a light swipe of a Flow button rather than destroying your F12 button. We'll be mixing it up with the CM AdminService and some Kusto sauce to top it off!