Author: aucadmin

Managing Macs at Google Scale

Clay Caviness, Google LLC Part of XW18

Google has one of the largest managed fleets of Macintosh computers in the world. Macintosh Operations is the internal team tasked with developing these tools and managing these machines globally. With nearly a hundred thousand assets to manage and an ever-changing security landscape, we have had to develop many of our own tools to effectively maintain our fleet and keep our end-users safe and productive. This session will discuss the tools we’ve developed, tools from the open-source community, and commercial tools we use to manage and maintain the fleet.

Technical fields: Large fleet management, configuration management, software deployment, imaging, MDM, security.

Intended audience: Macintosh system administrators looking for methods of managing that will scale with growth.

Clay has been a Mac and UNIX systems engineer since the early 90s and was thrilled when NeXT bought Apple. He has worked in advertising and technology companies since 1996. Clay is currently working at Google a Site Reliability Engineer in New York City, on the team managing a global fleet of tens of thousands of Macs.

Arek Dreyer to Present at X World!

We’re thrilled to announce that our second international guest at this year’s X world will be Arek Dreyer. Arek has been delivering courses and training in the Apple environment since 2001. He’s a consultant, author, course developer, trainer, and integrator. Arek provides coaching and mentoring for people that use iOS devices and Mac computers in complicated environments, and is the coauthor of many books and courses, including macOS Support Essentials 10.13, and Managing Apple Devices.

Arek is a long-time supporter of the X World community, and while we’ve lost count of the exact number of times he’s travelled to be with is, we’re sure that this is at least his fourth appearance, and we couldn’t be happier to have him back!

Learn more »

WWDC Student Scholarship Travel Assistance Applications Now Open

If you’re a currently enrolled student at an Australian or New Zealand University, and you’ve won an Apple Student Scholarship to attend WWDC 2018 (results announced Friday, April 20, 2018), we might be able to help out with your expenses. We’ve allocated 3 student support scholarships of $1500 each ($2000 for existing student members) to assist with airfares. Conditions apply, and applications close May 4 at 5pm (Sydney time).

Apply now »

Ed Marczak Confirmed for X World!

We’re thrilled to announce that the first of our international guest speakers for X World 2018 is Ed Marczak. Ed Marczak co-founded MacTech Conference and is a familiar face at Apple-related events all over the world, and we couldn’t be happier that he’s joining us this year!

Learn more »

WWDC Student Scholarship Travel Assistance

If you’re a currently enrolled student at an Australian or New Zealand University, and you win an Apple Student Scholarship to attend WWDC 2018 (results announced Friday, April 20, 2018), we might be able to help out with your expenses. We’ve allocated 3 student support scholarships of $1500 each ($2000 for existing student members) to assist with airfares. Conditions apply, and applications close May 4 at 5pm (Sydney time).

Learn more »

X World 2018 Call for Presenters

X World is our annual training event for OS X and iOS system administrators and support staff, and will be held at UTS, Sydney. This year the event will run June 27-29.

We are now calling for presenters who wish to offer sessions and workshops at this year’s event. If you have a background in the installation, configuration, deployment, or on-going administration of OS X based systems, or experience in iOS deployment, management and app development, or if you work in related areas, we’d really like to hear from you. Presenters receive free registration to X World, and qualify for subsidised flights and/or accommodation.

The call for presentations is now open, and closes Friday April 27, 2018, at 9pm Sydney time. Offers can be made by completing the submission form.

Want to request a session at X World? Submit an idea on our requests board. We can’t guarantee anyone will pick it up and run with it, but you might just inspire someone else to share their experience!

Capturing Willandra – Challenges & Experiences Bringing a Hidden Historical Site to Interactive Digital Life

Chris Little & Dale Patterson Part of CW17

The Willandra trackways are one of Australia’s most important historical sites. They include the footprints of our earliest Australians, some 20,000 years old, and all captured in the clay-pans of the Willandra lakes region. Unfortunately these national treasures are hidden, for their own protection, beneath a layer of sand and thus are completely unavailable to the broader public. This paper discusses the challenges in using digital capture techniques to capture and convert this data into interactive experience.