It has now become an annual tradition to meet as a Calgary Mac Admins community to watch the WWDC Keynote. Big thanks to Trevor Morris for organizing this as well as the sponsors that cover the costs. Looking forward to seeing you there! (Need more details? See the #macdeploy channel in the Mac Admins Slack.)
Our next meetup is Wednesday, February 1
Please respond in the #macdeploy channel in the MacAdmins Slack to confirm you’re attending, as there is a capacity limit of 10 at this venue. Parking is available at the building, at the lot next door, and on nearby streets.
Our first in-person meetup in over two years will be held on Wednesday, June 15 starting at 6:30 p.m. at Communo Space (1025 10 St SE, Calgary, AB). We plan to meet outdoors (yes, the rain should have stopped by then). There is (paid) parking nearby. If you plan to be there, drop in to the MacAdmins Slack to let us know. Thanks to Adam Berti of Berti Group for organizing this meetup.
We had a great time bringing the 2021 MacDeployment Conference to you. Thanks to some speedy work by our video specialist Ben Leavitt, all of the sessions from the conference are uploaded to our new YouTube Channel. We will also be adding links to the Sessions page to make them easier to reference, since that page divides the sessions into their original presentation blocks.
Thanks for making this year’s event our best-attended ever! We hope to see more of you at our meetups and our next conference, schedule for June 2023.
Based on your feedback and the schedule of Mac admin conferences already announced, we’ve decided on the following schedule for our 2021 Virtual Conference (subject to adjustments to accommodate our speakers):
The idea behind this schedule is three-fold: to give you a break between session blocks to address Zoom fatigue, to let you get some work in during the day (e.g., if it is hard for you to get a full day at the conference without being pulled into work), and to facilitate international attendance by providing some options outside the normal business day in North America. Yet this schedule still gives the feel of an event.
MacDeployment has always been a single track conference, and 2021 will be no different. Sessions will be scheduled as if they were all being given live, but we have offered speakers the option of pre-recording their session. We have not previously offered recordings of our sessions for later viewing, but we are looking into all the legalities and costs of doing that so that more people can share in these great sessions.
The two main themes for this year’s conference are (a) things we learned from (and learn as we exit) the pandemic, and (b) deploying Apple Silicon Macs. We’re also planning interesting follow-up sessions from our last conference (apparently, MDM is an even bigger thing than it was in 2019).
Yes, you will need to register to attend our conference. We will open registration in late April or early May. Because the cost structure for this conference is far different than our usual offering, we are still determining if we can offer registration for free. If not, we expect the cost will be nominal. We want to encourage Mac admins from all over the world to attend the session blocks that they can.
As always, we are curating a diverse array of speakers, made even richer by our ability to attract even more international speakers this year. (We already have speakers confirmed from 3 different continents representing 5 countries.) We have been known as a place for welcoming new voices to the Mac admin community and we’re happy to confirm that this will be the case again this conference.
So mark your calendar and watch for more info on this website. We’ll also update you on our conference (and other conferences, too) via Twitter (@MacDeploy). We are truly looking forward to bringing you our first virtual MacDeployment Conference.