In this workshop, certified project manager Craig Kilgo will help participants understand the principles of project management through discovery and practice by examining the problems during construction of the Death Star 2 and how those problems were mitigated.

The IT Lab Services department of James Madison University (Virginia) has developed a full featured integrated lab management system that has allowed the department to reduce student lab monitor staffing by 80% and become a near zero-touch shop managing over 1,200 endpoints throughout 60 buildings across the entire campus. The LabDash system integrates endpoint commissioning & decommissioning, imaging, non-persistence (freezing/thawing), real-time monitoring of multiple pulse indicators, live screenshots, remote control (including remote power cycling and hardware reset via AMT), equipment inventory, application usage statistics, digital signage integrated with room schedules, software request management, and image application inventories, all operated through a convenient easy-to-use browser-based interface. The system has been under in-house development since 2015 and is being considered for release to the public as an Open Source project. In this session, the software author will demonstrate the LabDash Dashboard and LabDashPE Windows Installer.

Zero touch deployments are the goal of every endpoint support team. At the height of the pandemic, no-contact deliveries of new systems for our faculty and staff forced us to to improve our rollouts and assume that we wouldn't have the luxury of seeing someone in person to get their system up and running. Our current process applies to Apple computers with both the Intel and M1 chipsets, and has resulted in a significant drop in service tickets for assistance with new computer setups. We have a similarly streamlined process in place for iPad deployments as well.

In this presentation, we will provide one method to make macOS baseline configurations easy through the use of the macOS Security Compliance Project (mSCP). We will provide an overview of mSCP, the benefits of using mSCP, how you can customize mSCP and discuss how we’ve implemented it in our organization.

Topics within the presentation include: Account migration for named-user accounts, transitioning from serialized device licensing to shared device licensing, deployment and activation challenges, license request and fulfillment processes, cost sharing and automatic entitlement management solutions, and providing student licensing using Kivuto's OnTheHub webstore for easy subscription management. There will be time at the end of this session for questions and answers as well as a discussion of current challenges.

A look into what it takes to host the LabMan conference. During this presentation, Louis (IIT) and Houston (VCU) will provide valuable insights into planning, organizing, and hosting LabMan at their respective schools. This presentation will cover a variety of topics focused on effectively managing the conference such as: venue and vendor selection, soliciting content and promoting to potential presenters, attracting sponsors and partners, and of course all advertising and communications it takes to effectively get the word out. Join us for a peek inside the journey we've been through to keep LabMan running.

In this combination-format presentation/white-boarding session, Houston (VCU) will present the years of effort leading to a culmination of user-centered design to deliver a dynamically generated desktop interface for academic endpoints that puts options at the fingertips of end-users by leveraging two widely popular open-source tools: RainMeter and Ubersicht. These desktop background overlay tools aren't often used in the enterprise, but can provide immense value. A white-boarding session will be part of the session to engage audience members in their most critical needs for communicating simply and effectively with end-users right at the desktop. If you're looking for a better alternative to generating static background images, using BGInfo, or simply not having the resources to offer any info on the desktop background aside from a logo, join us and see if these tools might help you enable this functionality for your end-users.