My six days at MMSMOA

Typically, I would do a short video recap of a week like I just had, but for some reason, I wasn’t feeling it. Maybe I’m just in a typing mood. Maybe it’s because I have some pics I want to share with you. Whatever the reason, we’re doing this in blog form.

If you don’t know, I just finished a six day trip to the Mall of America to participate in the Midwest Management Summit. This is one of the largest community events for all things related to system management including Intune, Autopilot, identity governance, security, and more. I was fortunate enough to be presenting three sessions with some incredible speakers (more on that later).

So join me as I take you through what it was like for me heading out on this adventure.

Day 1: Taking off and an Introduction to the Mall

Saturday, the day before my flight, I did my usual “pack everything last minute” ritual. It’s how I run my life. I did get a chance to prepare some Rubix swag to give out (thanks to my wife for her help with chopping up the sheets of stickers).

On Sunday I woke up at 4:30am (gross) to be ready for a 5am Uber pickup to Newark Airport. It was about a 40 minute ride and I’m pretty sure I just passed out for the duration. I have both CLEAR and TSA pre-check so I zoomed through security. This is more to quell my anxiety than anything else.

If you live in the US, specifically in my area, you’ve most likely been hearing of the ongoing troubles at Newark Airport in New Jersey. There’s construction, runway closures, lack of air-traffic controllers, and just general chaos. I kept checking my phone, and my flight was on time. So that’s all I was going to focus on. Luckily, things were smooth and we boarded on-time with no delays.

On the plane, I settled into my single seat and figured it was as good a time as any to show off my new shoes which were also matching my watch. “Damn, I’m looking good”, I thought to myself, before remembering I look like a hard-boiled egg.

It’s the little wins.

The flight got in early, so that was a cool surprise. I jumped in another Uber and made my way to the Radisson Blu Hotel which was connected to the Mall of America. That trip took a whopping 8 minutes.

I’d never been to this mall before, so I was kind of excited to see what the hype was about. My first step outside took me face to face with probably the coolest Lego store I’d ever seen. It looked like a Lego structure itself, and was topped off with some crazy characters.

So far, so good. I glanced at my watch and realized it was only 10:30am. The zone shift put me an hour behind, so I felt like I had all this extra time until the 3:30pm speaker reception. Luckily, I was in a giant, 4-story mall. Off to explore!

The first shop I stumbled into was a custom t-shirt thing. Being that t-shirts are my primary wardrobe 99% of the time, it was time to do some shopping. There were some cool pictures, funny icons, and interesting logos. There were a few Rick and Morty or Stranger Things designs I was considering, when the gentlemen behind the counter told me he can “put anything on a t-shirt, even a custom logo”… hold up.

Why I didn’t do this sooner is beyond me, but I promptly gave him the GetRubix logo seeing if it could be put on a black t-shirt. Short answer: it sure freakin’ could. What a cool thing to wear at MMS; I was really excited.

With my new shirts in hand, I decided to head back to the hotel and settle in. Some people unpack their suitcase and proceed to put their clothes and belongings in the provided drawers and closet. I don’t care about that; the clothes can stay in the suitcase. I decided to setup my mobile workstation that would be used for the week to get work done and prep for my sessions.

This setup consists of a portable 16” monitor, Logitech mini mechanical keyboard, mousepad and mouse, and an Anker power strip/supply to keep everything juiced up.

Sometimes I bring my Steam Deck which also connects to the monitor so I can play Elden Ring on the go, but I knew I had too much work to do in my downtime this week, if I even had downtime.

Time for the speaker reception (is this still day 1? Geez!)

Basically, all the speakers got together to officially kick off the start of MMS, mingle, get some food, and just chill. It was then opened up to attendees at 5pm.

Yes, that is a fishing vest. MMS apparently always has a theme, and this year was fishing. This meant all the speakers were given special vests to wear for the week, making us easy to identify for the attendees should they have questions or want to say hello. Not a bad idea.

I have to say, it was a real blast when the attendees showed up and we got to greet and talk to everyone. No matter how long this goes on, it’s so humbling to meet people who tell me how much they love the YouTube channel and all of my work on it. Then they want a selfie? Are you kidding? A truly surreal experience. With the reception coming to an end, MMS had officially kicked off.

Day 2: Sessions start!

Monday morning; the first official day of MMS! I woke up to seeing my good friend and fellow MVP, Dean Ellerby for breakfast at the Firelake, which is the bar/grille in the hotel (I would come to know their menu very, very well). Then we sat in on a few sessions that morning.

My first session was in the afternoon. It was called “Console or Code”, with the intention to help folks know when the best situations to use the Microsoft Graph were as opposed to the Intune admin center. I presented this session with Hailey Phillips and Nathan McNulty (congrats to Nathan on his newly awarded MVP title).

Preparing for sessions is a bit of an odd beast. Everyone is super busy during the work week, so it’s hard to find time for a Discord or Teams meeting. Still, it’s not the same as meeting up in person so that’s exactly what we ended up doing. There’s something kind of cool about seeing a bunch of MVPs and experts huddled up around their laptops, going over their session content. This was another one of those “how did I get here moments”.

Now it was session time (spoiler alert: we crushed it!)

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Nathan is one of the most brilliant minds when it comes to Microsoft security and that power was felt on the audience. Hailey, who is the system administrator for a little company called Pokemon, is a skilled, practitioner of automation and dev ops. It felt like an absolute privilege to speak with them, even if I was just the comic relief.

After the session, I ventured back into the mall for coffee. Luckily, I found a Dunkin’ so I was happy. And that was pretty much Day 1.

Day 3: Security and Tents

Time for day 2 of MMS, which is really day 3 of my trip. I spent the morning getting some work done- the world doesn’t stop just because you’re at a conference. Specifically, most of my time has been spent working on getting Hyperpilot out, which is the first, official app to be released by Rubix.

The session for today was all about Zero Trust strategies for Intune and Defender. Fellow MVP, Sucheta Gawade asked me to co-present with her earlier this year since the topic is right up my alley. While we were able to meet the week prior to review the content, we ended up having lunch that day to go over everything right before the session.

There were also churros as the snack right before going on stage!

This was a tough topic to cover within the session time, even though it was an hour and 45 minutes. When it comes to Zero Trust for devices, you have to talk about Intune, Entra ID, conditional access, compliance, mobile app management, Defender for Endpoint, EDR; it’s a lot.

Given how much content there was, the feedback was positive. Sucheta and I had a really interesting dynamic on stage and hopefully we were able to impart some things for folks to bring up with their security teams.

After this session, I then had an hour of “fishing sessions” scheduled. No, I wasn’t actually fishing. The conference had set up several tents that the speakers would hang out in for a certain amount of time before or after their sessions so that attendees could have some 1x1 time to ask about their specific issues. I think this was a cool idea. It gave folks the chance to ask questions they may not have wanted to ask in front of a crowd, or a forum to discuss and whiteboard ideas. The tents had drinks, snacks, and a big computer monitor.

I was able to meet with 4 different attendees during my time in the tent and it was great. Before closing the day by having dinner with some friends, Hailey scared the crap out of me while Dean caught it on camera. Do I look surprised?

Day 4: The Intimidating Session

Whoa- when I woke up on Wednesday morning, believe me when I tell you I was feeling it! The first day of a conference always seems to be fueled by adrenaline, which tends to spill into the second day. But I could feel at the start of day 3 that the excitement was wearing off and I was left with the reality: that I was over a thousand miles from home, smack dab in the middle of the week. Not only were there two days left, but today I had to deliver a session with two powerful co-presenters: James Robinson and Rudy Ooms.

But more on that in a second.

One of my favorite parts of any conference is the swag that the sponsors usually give away. And MMS did not disappoint. I got plenty of stickers, t-shirts, notepads, and pens, but the coolest swag this year went to Eido, an Intune reporting platform. They were handing out a custom made card game (Exploding Endpoints) that included MVP characters, and wouldn’t you know it, I was in the mix!

It’s probably safe to say that made my day.

Now, getting back to the session, let me give you a little backstory. I submitted the topic of an Autopilot survival guide back in December. Speakers are always encouraged to team up for sessions as they’re an hour and 45 minutes long and therefore more interesting with multiple presenters. For this session, James reached out to me to see if we could partner up. Now if you manage endpoints with Intune and don’t know about James’s Open Intune Baselines, then you’re late to the party. This has become a standard in the Windows management world, and now it’s creator wants to partner with me at an MMS session… sure, that’s normal.

Then, who other than Mr. Rudy Ooms messaged me and wanted to know if he could present with me on the same Autopilot session. Was this a joke? I’ve followed Rudy’s blog for the better part of a decade when I started working on Intune. It didn’t ever cross my mind that we would meet, let alone present together at a conference. If there was ever a real life “we’re not worthy” moment, this was it.

This session had the least content planned out of all of them, but it was okay. It started as a “stories from the trenches” meets “AMA”, and that’s exactly what we did. All three of us were no strangers to Autopilot. We all had our own perspectives, tricks, and opinions. We shared pointers, told interesting stories, and answered questions. I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel like the odd man out, purely based on my own imposter syndrome. But the feedback was positive, and my co-presenters were incredible gentlemen who made me feel at home.

One specific piece of feedback I read stated “This was the perfect trio of speakers”.

Truly surreal.

Day 3 of MMS was a success.

Day 5: Wrapping Up

If Wednesday felt like it was dragging, you should have seen me when Thursday started. I was tired.

I had no more sessions today, so I started by having breakfast with Dean and Hailey, then it was off to get some work done.

Dean was able to find a beautiful conference room and filmed some interviews with various speakers and sponsors. We had a great chat (as we usually do) and I suspect it will be live any day now.

After that, Nathan and I had a fun lunch at Johnny Rockets, which has a retro burger shop vibe. We chatted about consulting, tech, computers, and being dads (he even may have helped me find the perfect Snapdragon PC, but more on that later).

Wait- I almost forgot something very important amidst all the speaking and conference activities: gifts for my kids! There was absolutely no way I could come back from the Mall of America empty handed.

My search for gifts led me around the mall where I made note of some strange stores; specifically these two:

To my surprise, I also came across a Toys ‘R Us- I thought they were all gone? And this life size Lord of Cinder from Dark Souls 3 in the GameStop window blew me away.

Luckily, both my kids love these Squishmallow stuffed animals, so you can imagine how pumped I was when they had a whole store dedicated to them. Shopping was complete.

The rest of Thursday was spent working on and off, hanging out with other speakers, and getting to chat and answer questions from attendees. I snapped this pic of Brian Mason, the host of MMS, because he looked way too cool zipping around on his Segway all week. Thanks Brian for welcoming me and being awesome!

At the end of the day, speakers and attendees gathered in the main room for the closeout of the conference. The marketing crew put together some incredible content of the week, one in particular reel featured yours truly, both speaking about the event and my usual nonsense (something about coffee).

The full clip can be watched here.

Day 6: Going Home

On Friday I woke up at 4:30am to leave the hotel at 5am for the airport. It was time to go home.

My flight was supposed to take off at 7:15am, but was delayed, specifically due to the chaos at Newark airport back in New Jersey. I was getting a bit anxious as I heard nothing but horror stories about crazy long delays and cancellations. But at 7:45am, we were boarding the plane. Everything was smooth until we got close to New Jersey. We had to circle in the air for over 40 minutes before landing. I suppose it could have been worse.

By 1:30pm I was home. And boy, was I wiped out!

So that’s it. I spent six days away from my home and family, which is always a difficult thing to do, but let me be clear: it was an incredible week. I had been to an MMS conference back in October (Florida), but this was the real deal. And it was everything I hoped it would be and more.

Thanks to all of my co-presenters. You’re incredibly talented individuals and I had fun speaking with all of you. We should do it again some time. My biggest thanks, however, is going to go out to those who approached me and told me they love my work…I suppose I’ll say it: my fans.

Everyday I met with folks who told me how much they like the YouTube channel, or how my device migration solution has helped them, or how one of my blogs got them out of a jam at work. You have no idea how much it means to hear that from you directly. I got into this community to give back what I learned from it, and to have it all come together in person is truly a meaningful experience that I won’t be able to express here.

So I’ll just say thank you, and we’ll be seeing you.

This post originally appeared on Rubix - Solving for the Modern Workplace.