Yesterday I attended the MyCUGC Texas XL event in Houston Texas. It was held at the Houston Space Center which was quite the venue for sure. I wish I had, like others, flown in early and toured the facility. I heard it was well worth the time. We did get to tour the 747 that carried the shuttle from place to place as well as a mock-up of the shuttle itself. The positive impact that the US space program had on our technology growth cannot be measured. I am glad we did what we did, and I think it is a mistake not to be doing it still.
Patrick Coble kicked off the day with another of his enjoyable (if you are following best practices) and frightening (if you are not) security sessions. Not only did he offer good information and best practices for work, but he also gave pointers on how to best protect yourself personally. I need to go check dehashed.com and https://haveibeenpwned.com/ for any of my email addresses. My wife’s as well. It is recommended that you run a check on your domain, as there are now more cracked credentials on dehashed then there are people alive on the planet. And he dangled the bucket list item of driving the Autobahn and Nurburgring pictures for everyone to enjoy.
Jason Samuel was up next talking about authentication, Azure AD, Citrix Cloud, and my newest favorite topic, FIDO2. If you haven’t started looking in to this, you should. I cannot wait to eliminate username/password from my daily routine. Let me have a FIDO2 logon capability and I’ll be a happy man, I know my wife will too. Time to shop for some options. Jason showed how to integrate these options with Azure AD and front end Citrix Cloud permitting access for your users without them utilizing a username or password.
Nick Rintalan carried us on with everyone’s favorite question LTSR or CR. Many debate this question on a regular basis, but truly what he told us it boils down to is that it depends on the needs of the organization. Many are required to have the stability and non-changing LTSR for support of applications like Epic. Otherwise, it is truly best to be at CR in my opinion as you are able to take advantage of the latest features released by Citrix
Ron Oglesby talked after lunch about Performance Analytics. He gave a very informative presentation starting with the definitions of AI and ML and how each are utilized in performance analytics. Then he went on to present what Citrix had to offer in the performance analytics site.
Steve Greenberg finished off the day with a build your own session of sorts. I have experienced this previously and I really think it should become a staple session for the MyCUGC XL events. End of the day, he put up a list of topics that the attendees could pick from and the group could discuss. Which is really what the MyCUGC group is best for. Talk about your ideas, concerns, troubles, and find out the answers from the experts in attendance. or help someone with an answer yourself. Would you call that “Live Crowdsourcing”? I think I may need to go lock in that term.
The company I work for, Conversant Group, was happy to sponsor the MyCUGC Texas XL event, and it gave me the chance to speak for a few minutes to the attendees which I enjoyed. We got to meet a lot of people from the Houston, Austin, and San Antonio groups, and I got to catch up with a lot of the people I have worked with over the years both in the Dallas group and just from being in the End User Community for so many years. Moved to Tennessee, but still got to spend time with the people I have enjoyed working with for so many years. I was glad to attend and can’t wait to see everyone again. Maybe at the EUC Masters Retreat?