MMS Midway wrapped up in San Diego at the end of October, and I’m still thinking about it. Four days at the Manchester Grand Hyatt, close to 500 people between attendees, speakers and sponsors, and almost half of them were at an MMS event for the first time. That last number is the one that stuck with me. This community keeps growing, and the new folks showed up ready to participate.
One thing attendees—including first-timers—love about MMS is that you don’t get lost in the crowd. It feels big enough to offer an incredible depth of knowledge, but still small enough to find your people and have real conversations.
Here’s what I took away from the week.
It started on an aircraft carrier
The welcome reception was on the USS Midway. Attendees, speakers and sponsors, all on the flight deck, surrounded by old planes that are still cool no matter how many times you’ve seen them.
Then Brian, Harjit, Greg, and Scott arrived by helicopter. Not a slideshow, not a video, an actual helicopter landing on the deck. If you want to set the tone for a conference, that’s one way to do it.
Don’t take my word for it. The sizzle reel picks up right at the landing: watch the sizzle reel.
That’s the thing about MMS that doesn’t come through in a session catalog. The content is deep and technical, and the event is also genuinely fun. Those two things aren’t in conflict.
The MMS crew caught the 3-wire
On a carrier, the landing every pilot is chasing is the 3-wire: the third arresting cable, the one that means you set it down exactly where it belongs. The MMS staff caught it this year. Top Gun was set in San Diego, and this crew flew like they’d been training for it all year. A carrier deck for the welcome reception, a helicopter entrance, a packed agenda and an event that pulled in almost half first-timers. That doesn’t happen by accident.
Brian, Greg, and the whole crew: you knocked this one out of the park. Consider the tower buzzed.
The sessions covered a lot of ground
I spend most of my time in applications and patching, so it would be easy to stay in one lane all week. MMS doesn’t really let you do that. A few that I sat in on:
- Next-generation OS deployment using DeployR Community Edition with Gary Blok and Michael Niehaus. Essentially a swap-in replacement for MDT and ConfigMgr OSD. I had a trial license request submitted before the session was over.
- PSADT 4.x with Melissa McDonald and Jordan Benzing. Great walkthrough of what’s new in the PowerShell App Deployment Toolkit. I walked out wanting to build my own GUI front end for it.
- Drivers, OEM Tools and Task Sequences with Gary Blok and Mike Terrill. Drivers are still drivers.
- Intune Policy: Latest Advancements and Future Innovation with Aasawari Navathe.
- Think Less, Build More: GitHub Copilot and Agentic Development for IT Pros with Morten Bøtkjær Nilsen and Andreas Sobczyk.
- Patch Tuesday In Review with Bryan Dam and Jordan Benzing, which I got to help with a little after my booth shift.
Bare metal deployment, app packaging internals, policy, agentic development, patch management. Same conference, same week. That range is the reason I keep coming back, and it’s why I tell people not to build their whole schedule around the topics they already know.
My sessions
I had three on the schedule, and they went better than I expected.
Demystifying Local AI: Running Intelligent Automation on Hardware You Already Own, with Donnie Taylor. Well attended, lots of good questions, and most of the room stayed to the end. The theme was simple: you probably already own hardware that can run useful models locally, and you don’t need a budget request to start.
Owning Your Career: Be the CEO of You, with Chad Lich and Michelle Hammarskjöld. This was a happy hour session, and happy hour sessions normally start thinning out a little past the one-hour mark. This one didn’t. People stayed all the way through, and the questions kept coming, including a good one about getting involved in user-groups that I still owe some resources on.
Debate Me, Bro: Settling the Ultimate Intune App Deployment Rivalries, with Andy Rivas. We added David Brook as our fight referee, which turned out to be the best decision we made. He was fantastic and the audience participation was excellent. If you’ve ever had strong feelings about how an app should be packaged, this was the room for you.
A big thanks to my co-speakers
None of these sessions happen without the people next to me on stage.
- Donnie Taylor, for taking local AI from “sounds complicated” to “I can try this on Monday.”
- Chad Lich and Michelle Hammarskjöld, for a career session that kept a happy hour crowd in their seats to the very end.
- Andy Rivas, for being willing to argue with me about app deployment in front of a live audience, and for making it fun.
And an honorable mention to the great David Brook, who signed up to referee a fight and stole the show doing it. Every debate needs someone to keep the peace, and David kept it with style.
The 7 a.m. session that filled the room
At 7:00 a.m. on Tuesday, Patch My PC and 2Pint Software ran Rekindling the Wall of Fire: Bare Metal at Enterprise Scale. Over 200 people showed up for it. At 7 a.m. At a conference. In San Diego.
The session announced a partnership between the two companies and backed it up with a live demo: 100 laptops imaged in about 35 minutes. It ran two more times during the event. Whatever you deploy with, watching a wall of laptops light up at once never gets old.
The partnership also has practical potential beyond the demo. 2Pint’s technology will help Patch My PC provide more value to customers who don’t currently have the capability to image machines, patch them, or deploy drivers. It could also open up ways to manage server applications. That’s a meaningful step for teams that need those capabilities but don’t have them today.
The booth is where the real conversations happen
I worked the Patch My PC booth all day Tuesday, and I’ll say what every vendor says because it’s true: session transitions are chaos, and that’s when the best questions come out.
Attendees told us we have the best swag. I’ll take it.
The moment I’ll remember, though, was a customer who came up with problems she was hitting in Advanced Insights for Intune reporting. I relayed them to one of our people on the spot, he said the team would fix them, and I was able to walk back to her and tell her they were being addressed. Start to finish in about 30 minutes. That’s the version of customer support you only get in person, and it’s a big part of why booth duty doesn’t feel like a chore.
A lot of the other booth traffic was questions about the partnership that I didn’t have complete answers to yet. That’s fine. “I’ll find out and follow up” is a legitimate answer, and capturing the question is more useful than guessing.
And the rest of it
A group of us customer engineers took a Waymo to Coasterra to meet more of the customer success team. Great food, and a view of downtown San Diego that made the whole trip feel like a vacation for about 90 minutes. Ask me in person about the Waymo tech support stories.
There was also the Midway Debrief and Raffle with Kent Agerlund and Kim Oppalfens to close things out, and the Community Block Party at Rustic Root, fueled by Patch My PC. Snacks, beverages, and the kind of conversations that turn into next year’s sessions.
If you’re thinking about next year
Go. Especially if you’ve never been.
Half the room at Midway this year was new, which means nobody is walking in as the only first-timer. Build a schedule that includes at least two sessions outside your day job. Talk to the vendors, including the ones you don’t currently pay. And if you see me at a booth or in a hallway, say hi. I’d rather talk to you than look at my phone.
For more information and future dates, go to mmsmoa.com.
Thanks again to Donnie, Chad, Michelle, Andy and David for sharing a stage with me, and to the MMS crew for putting on an event that’s both seriously technical and seriously fun.
Hit me up if you want to dig into local AI, app deployment arguments, or how to get more out of your first MMS.