Oh, hi there. I'm Andrew, and OSD is my happy place.
It all started early on in my 15 year career as an IT Consultant. Novell, Windows XP, Symantec Ghost, and an ever expanding list of tricks and tweaks. Once our education clients could afford fancy servers I was able to finally dedicate enough resources to run Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager.
And it. Was. Glorious.
Managing SCCM installations for schools became a big part of my job. Mostly straightforward installations; for some I was the only cook in the kitchen, for others I filled more of a supporting role. I'm sorry to say that I never got very fancy with it back then. I accepted inconveniences as limitations. There was an imperative to keep things vanilla so my coworkers and clients could jump in as needed without a learning curve, I certainly did get a bit too comfortable in my box.
I remember my first exposure to Autopilot. I was at a conference, it was meant to be a day-long session on ConfigMgr. Instead, a Microsoft rep took us through Intune and then showed us how to create an Autopilot PPKG with Windows Configuration Designer. It seemed clear that Microsoft wanted wanted everyone to abandon ConfigMgr like it was the easiest thing in the world.
"Any questions?"
"Uh, yeah, what about printers? Logon scripts? Mapped drives? Any of the local resources our entire districts rely on?"
"Oh, well, you don't."
It was immediately clear that Microsoft's cloud vision was not going to work for a single person I knew at the time, for a very long time, not without radical changes in how everything and everyone worked. And even then, in a world where every person in every department, staff, faculty, student, it would never work as well as what we'd built on-prem. And why would it? Everyone was on-prem. What possible reason did we have to even bother with hybrid, much less cloud-only? And that's the way it stayed.
Until 2020. Long story short, I'm still not aware of any of my prior clients that have gone completely cloud-only. Many districts had already been on the Google train for a good while by then, so students were almost exclusively on Chomebooks, but even that group of users had exceptions. Supporting STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) meant computer labs will continue to be around for a good while. And good luck getting the office staff converted! Can you? Yeah, but at what cost?
Fast forward, now I work for a single organization; so I'm in the same environment every day. That might sound boring, but it means I can play and experiment. I wanted a place to share what I've learned as I get into the fancy and the weird. I don't manage hundreds of thousands of endpoints, so my approach and the questions I ask can sometimes be niche. I understand perfectly well how a cloud-only approach fits for some, but a lot of the sentiment I've found online is that it's the only way to do computing in the modern era correctly - that on-prem/full OS deployment is dead. Maybe those people bought into the opinion that desktop computers are dead, too, I'm not sure. What I do know is that nothing is faster, more robust, or more secure than classic OSD. Of course, Microsoft would prefer we all use Intune and Autopilot, so Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager doesn't get the R&D love it once did. So I'm going to get fancy and weird when I have to and I'll share the goods here.
Thanks for visiting. I hope I have some tidbit laying around that's worth your time!