After hearing about these new certifications for a good 3 or 4 years, I’m stoked that Tech2000 has now made the new Advanced OS X Certification exams available. Currently, there are three exams: OS X Directory Services Specialist Certification Exam OS X Deployment Specialist Certification Exam OS X Mobile Device and Profile Specialist Certification Exam These exams are a more modern rendition of what Apple Training would be providing if they still did any courses beyond the OS X Server ACTC. Basically, you can think of it as though the previous Security or Xsan exams were swapped out with Mobile Devices, which makes sense given the changing climate of things.…
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My New Book on Apple Configurator
My next book, coauthored with Mr. TJ Houston, is now available. The rough draft was mostly complete the week of MacSysAdmin in Sweden. I announced the book at the conference and was busy at work after to get as much as possible complete. And after many an hour and month spent editing this book (props to TJ for doing a lot of the editing), it’s finally available on Packt Publishing. To quote the site, this is what the book is on: The Apple Configurator is an incredible piece of software which grants full control in mobile device management, but on a larger scale. The popularity of people taking their own…
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Apperian's New Goodness: Remote Control for iPad
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The New Caching Service In OS X Server
These days, new services get introduced in OS X Server during point releases. OS X now has a Software Caching server built to make updates faster. This doesn’t replace Apple’s Software Update Server mind you, it supplements. And, it’s very cool technology. “What makes it so cool” you might ask, given that Software Update Server has been around for awhile. Namely, the way that clients perform software update service location and distribution with absolutely no need (or ability) for centralized administration. Let’s say that you have 200 users with Mac Minis and an update is released. That’s 200 of the same update those devices are going to download over your…
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Penn State MacAdmins Back for 2013
Last year, I had a great time at the Penn State MacAdmins conference. There were tons of smart people to mingle with and everyone had plenty to discuss when it came to managing the Mac. There were a lot of people from education but also plenty from companies. The talks were well run and the conference location, the Penn Stater, was awesome. I love how it’s like a big winding maze. Having gone to school in a town like State College (Athens, GA), I’ve always had a warm spot for cute college towns. And State College is clearly a special place. I’d recommend a trip there to anyone that loves…
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Keynote From JAMF Nation
In case you were there and would like a copy, here’s the slides from the presentation I did this week at the JAMF Nation User Conference 2012. If you weren’t there, then perhaps they will help you in some way. JNUC2012 The session was recorded so I’ll try and post when it becomes available for download.
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Restricting Access To Sites On iOS Devices
One of the more common requests we get for iOS devices is to restrict what sites on the web that a device can access. This can be done in a number of ways. The best, in my experience, has been using a proxy. In Apple Configurator 1.2 there’s an option for a Global HTTP Proxy for Supervised devices. This allows you to have a proxy for HTTP traffic that is persistent across apps. Each Wi-Fi network that you push to devices also has the ability to have a proxy associated as well. This is supported by pretty much every MDM solution, with screens similar to the following, which is how…
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JAMF Nation User Conference 2012
I mentioned the JAMF Nation User Conference on the site before, but now I need to mention it again. Mostly because I’ll now be doing a presentation now. I know, I said I wasn’t going to be doing much public speaking. But the only conference I’ve been to in the last decade that I wasn’t speaking at has been the JAMF Nation User Conference. Sooo, how could I not, when the conference is, after all, in the city I live in! Anyway, my session has been added to the sessions page: http://www.jamfsoftware.com/events/user-conferences/jamf-nation-user-conference-2012/sessions Hope to see you there!
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Goodbye & Thanks To MacSysAdmin
MacSysAdmin, a great conference in Gothenburg, Sweden, is now over. The conference went off without a hitch. There were many great presentations and speakers. But I just wanted to take a quick moment to thank the great people from Apoio and especially Patric and Tycho. Tycho, I hope, can now ride Sleipnir home and take his well deserved Odinsleep. Anyway, MacSysAdmin was a class act all round and something I’m proud to have been a part of for the past few years. Thanks, guys! Now to finish up my MacTech talk!
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My MacSysAdmin Presentations For Today
The first presentation I’ll be doing at MacSysAdmin today is on Windows Server in Mac OS X and iOS environments, which can be found here: MacSysAdmin_Windows The second presentation I’ll be doing today at MacSysAdmin is on iOS deployment, which can be found here: MacSysAdmin_iOS If you’re not able to attend then I hope you will enjoy. I’ll try and get them to Tycho for uploading to the official site asap.