[Ended] BigFix Houston User Group - 8/14/2018

I’m excited to announce our first BigFix Houston User Group event!

Details and registration are at https://community.ibm.com/community/user/security/events/event-description?CalendarEventKey=794fd37e-4a79-4cbb-9013-aba05ac3085d&CommunityKey=02c017e9-7a01-4f7e-bd30-5bb5b582708f&Home=%2Fcommunity%2Fuser%2Fsecurity%2Fcommunities%2Fcommunity-home

When: Tuesday, August 14, 2018, from 10am to 2pm CST
Where: The IBM facility at 2 River Way Dr, Houston, TX, 77056.
Map link is at https://goo.gl/maps/PoStw85szep

BigFix User Groups provide an opportunity for IBM developers, product managers, partners, and customers to come together in a collaborative setting; allows the community to share innovative solutions and techniques; ensures your voice is heard when planning new features and capabilities; and helps you get the most out of your investment.

We’re still working on the list of speakers, but a tentative list of topics includes

  • Design Session
  • Using BigFix in Pre-boot
  • BigFix OS Deployment with Linux
  • BigFix Inventory
  • BigFix Compliance
  • BigFix WebUI
  • BigFix Server Performance and Flash Storage
  • YOUR topics! (Customer stories, techniques, and challenges)
    • Maintenance Scheduling in Mission Control

We are very much interested in having customer user stories. Please contact me here in the forum or at the IBM Community site with any topics you’d like to present or discuss. Having some slides for discussion might be helpful but is definitely not required - bring any topics you’d like to discuss or learn more about.

This is the first event for BigFix Houston User Group. Let’s see what we can make of this! Please RSVP so we can plan accordingly.

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Only two weeks left until the BigFix Houston User Group! Can’t wait to meet everyone, and we still have room for customer topics. Reply back here or private message me if you’d like to host a discussion or have any other topic requests.

We have started to firm up our speakers list, at this point we have

  • Back to Basics: Architecture, Content Types, Content Sites, and Communication Protocols - Jimmy Glass (Platform Evangelist, HCL BigFix Lab Services)
  • BigFix Product Roadmap - I-Lung Kao (BigFix Product Manager)
  • BigFix Server Performance and Flash Storage - Tony Sater (Storage Solutions Offering Manager) & Kelly Groff (WW Senior Offering Manager - FlashSystem)
  • Using BigFix in Pre-boot - John Golembiewski (WW Endpoint Technical Sales Leader, Security Architect, and Technical Evangelist)
  • BigFix Inventory (TBD)
  • BigFix Compliance (TBD)
  • Maintenance Schedules in Mission Control - Jason Walker (NASA Johnson Space Center)

For those who can spare the time to stay a bit later, we’ll try to have some breakout sessions and an after-event social.

It’s not too late to register, please RSVP if you plan to attend by signing up at https://community.ibm.com/community/user/security/events/event-description?CalendarEventKey=794fd37e-4a79-4cbb-9013-aba05ac3085d&CommunityKey=02c017e9-7a01-4f7e-bd30-5bb5b582708f&Home=%2Fcommunity%2Fuser%2Fsecurity%2Fcommunities%2Fcommunity-home or the greatly shortened URL at https://ibm.biz/BdZNXN

Reminder, this event is happening TOMORROW !

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I sent this earlier through the Community page, but unfortunately the web-based mail form messed up the formatting. Here’s how it should have looked…

I wanted to take a moment to thank each and every one of you who was able to attend our first BigFix Houston User Group yesterday. The turnout was great, discussion was lively, and I think we were all able to come away knowing more than we did going in, so in my book this was a great success.

I especially want to thank our presenters. Jimmy Glass started us off with “Back to Basics”, an overview of BigFix architecture, communication, and content types. I-Lung Kao followed this with a discussion of the Product Roadmap for 2018, with particular focus on Patch Policy and Third-Party Integrations. Tony Sater was up next with Flash Storage performance gains on BigFix Root Servers. Galley Sarai presented on BigFix Inventory and Software Use Analysis. We closed with customer stories from myself on using custom action constraints to grant end-user control over maintenance windows, and Sudha Vasudevan on health and recovery of third-party security tools using Client Dashboards and Policy Actions for restart/repair/reinstall.

We had planned for the event to wrap up at 2pm, but with all the lively discussion we ended up sticking around until shortly after 5. This was even with JGo being called away to save the day somewhere else in the world (we missed you!) and having to skip his talk about BigFix Client in Windows Pre-Boot; we’ll have to save that one for next time.

We did have some open questions, I’ll see what we can do about following-up on them. Here’s a list I captured, but the discussion was moving very quickly so if I missed any please direct message me and I’ll get them added to my to-do list -

  • Configuring client initial registration at install time, how-to on clientsettings.cfg
  • Controlling external site Gather interval and/or Schedule * Managing Group Policy Settings how-to / best practices
  • BFI - is Software Usage History/Statistics reset when a product is upgraded across versions?

For everyone who presented content, if you’re willing, please upload your presentation to the BigFix Houston User Group document library. If you need any assistance with uploading documents, feel free to contact me and I’ll see what I can do to help.

Thanks again for everyone for making this event a success, to all our attendees from across the state and across the country, our friends from the Austin area, to all of our presenters, and to Galley Sarai and John Golembiewski for all their work behind-the-scenes to bring this together.

I’m looking forward to our next meetup, so please start thinking about what topics you’d like to see, what you’d like to present, and what we can do to make our next meetup even better [maybe avoiding August is a good start :slight_smile: ]

Sincerely,
Jason Walker

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