jeremyxmentzell

Where in the world is Jer?

This felt like the first time I really wanted to write and share a bit of what I’ve been up to or felt like I was in a place where it felt like I was not the dog amongst the flames.

I animated the ‘This is fine’ comic

While many sheltered remotely, yours truly was madly engineering, implementing and deploying solutions and devices for complex business problems as fast as I’ve been able to.

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While maddening at times; it’s incredibly rewarding to see your technology & end point solutions helping people, even more when they’re being used to help end the pandemic.

Between the start in this role and now I think I’ve built close to 20 different custom iOS & iPadOS-centric solutions; which is wild to me.

During my hiring process I had mostly analyzed what was needed for the environment – engineering and streamlining device self-enrollment by a user, a new more secure baseline guided by DISA Security Technical Implementation Guides, and better application deployment methodology and oversight.

What I did not count on was: pandemic, the swift approval of the aforementioned customized solutions, and the big one – moving to hybrid cloud.

Oh yes. I was forced there kicking and screaming. (I am still screaming, though I hope one day to not be.)

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So now I’m an accidental Microsoft Intune engineer. It’s a very different tool than I’ve ever used before. I don’t think that its a “bad” tool but it operates very very differently (to me) than other popular MDMs that I’ve used. It will be interesting to see how I feel about it in a year or two. Its pace of change and trying to follow it is also very hard for me. Azure AD is very very cool and works mostly how I expect it to. Conditional Access is really cool as well.

They have a like “What-If” function for kind of forecasting what a change to a specific policy will do but amongst the many things I’d like to give feedback on (I still don’t know how to do that) I’d really like to see some kind visual representation of what policies, groups, and configurations apply to given device or user from a hierarchical standpoint, visualizing what overrides or supersedes what – again – in a visual sense. Due to the make up of what aspects are controlled in the different interfaces – its really hard to kind of trace all the different aspects of the control of a given device (or user I suppose).

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What that really means though – is that I got to build a new, unapologetically secured & manicured environment. My goal now is migrating the fleet which is exciting and well underway. Full user-driven enrollment, automated and managed application deployment and end-to-end control of every device.

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It’s Fall again; if you know me you know Spooky Season is my time to shine. All my orange gear is out on full display, pumpkin shopping will likely be this weekend as well as decorating. I wish it didn’t go by so fast as I fear we’ll all be gathering around the table for turkey and discussing what to buy one another sooner than we think.

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I’ll probably share some thoughts on iOS & iPadOS 15 after macOS 12 ships as I think these will probably need to be better commented on and evaluated together, especially with macOS now running on Apple Silicon.

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Regarding the Pandemic, I mean. Wow. What else is there to say. Horrible time. Be Safe. Be Considerate.