I am the SCCM administrator for a mid-sized public university (approximately 17,500 students) in the southeast United States. Higher Education institutions face unique challenges in information technology. We often deal with short-staffed and under-funded IT departments, but we make due with what we are given. We also deal with having to support a wide-range of devices, from standard business-class devices to the $400 special-of-the-week. We often do not have the luxury of saying "No", and must make these sub-pair devices work with our system. This presents challenges for system administrators that are not usually seen in the business world. This blog will focus on some of these challenges, and how my colleagues and I overcome them. I will hopefully present valuable information that can help others in their environment.
In my daily job, I am the primary application and image administrator. I package most of the software and images that go into our SCCM environment. In addition to SCCM, I also administrator System Center Orchestrator 2012, System Center Operations Manager 2012, HP Web JetAdmin, Pharos Uniprint, Deep Freeze, and TechExcel ServiceWise. A lot of my posts will focus on how SCCM can work with these other systems.
If you have any comments or suggestions for posts, please send them my way. I will try and post at least weekly.
I work in Higher Ed too and in much the same capacity as you. I'm about to migrate and/or upgrade from SCCM 2007 R2 to SCCM 2012 R2. My site design is rather simple; a single site with one site server, one protected distribution point at a remote campus, and a SQL site DB server which also hosts the WSUS DB and SRS, and one FSP server. I'll also be going fully VMs this time around. Do you have any thoughts on site design as it pertains to Higher Ed, SCCM2012 R2, and keeping things simple. I have about 10,000 clients (workstations & servers) and plan to support Macs going forward.
ReplyDelete