We are planning on having our third meeting of 2014. This meeting will be held at Microsoft’s Office: 60 East Rio Salado Parkway, Tempe, AZ 85281, 12th floor on Thursday, May 8th. The meeting will start at 3:00 PM with the welcome time at 2:30 PM and will run until 5:00 PM – come early and socialize a bit before the meeting starts.

Come and get an early look at the session Mike will be presenting the following week at TechEd 2014: No Lab, No Problem! Building the Essential Lab Environment Using Microsoft Technologies

The days of requiring extensive hardware and resources to build out a decent test environment are fading fast as new technology and more powerful hardware come out. Yet, often times companies disregard the importance of a lab and take major risks by doing things directly in their production environment. It is always best to have a lab to ‘play’ around in, test that script that is needed to be used in production or simply test and document an upgrade processes. This can easily be done by using equipment and software that is already available and can prevent costly mistakes to a production environment. Using tools like the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, Hyper-V, PowerShell and a little bit of automation, you can quickly be on your way to setting up the Essential Lab Environment. Once the framework is in place, building out new environments is a snap. Need to refresh a few test client systems or build new ones? No problem! With a reusable solution in place, you should never be without a lab environment again.

Mike is the Systems Management Practice Lead at 1E. He specializes in the design, architecture and installation of Configuration Manager and Windows operating system deployments. Prior to joining 1E in 2007, he worked 10 years for a global strategic outsourcing company as an IT Architect specializing in SMS, software distribution and operating system deployment. His most recent project included deploying System Center 2012 Configuration Manager and Windows 7 to a 450K seat environment. He founded and runs the Arizona Systems Management User Group and has been working with SMS since version 1.2.

Registration Link:
https://clicktoattend.microsoft.com/en-us/Pages/EventDetails.aspx?EventID=187696

Originally posted on http://miketerrill.net