Bay Area San Francisco

MacTech Pro Events are the next incarnation of MacTech’s successful one-day, single-track, regional hotel-based seminars with a specific focus on the needs of professional Apple IT Pros, techs and consultants.

These events are specifically designed for those that support others using Apple technologies ... including small-to-medium sized business, organization support staff, and specialized Apple consultants.

With an all new curriculum built from the ground up, the event benefits both return attendees and those that have never attended a MacTech event. Best yet, this in person event maximizes attendees chance to meet with peers, find critical vendor contacts, and foster the type of collaborative networking that the Apple community is famous for.

Included: Packed schedule. All sessions. Expert speakers. Lunch and breaks. Vendor interaction.

Sessions and Topics

Apple's Lockdown: SIP, Read Only System, GateKeeper and ProtectX

Even the most basic security concerns have exploded -- and Apple wants to have the most secure operating systems on the planet. As an IT professional or consultant, you deal with Apple’s choices and the ever more protected nature of that ecosystem every day. Where in days past, you could deploy a copy of a “perfect” system, now that “imaging” has all but gone away and Apple has moved toward a more and more protected space for its users, your job could be to fight against features and new lockdowns, a never ending battle, or you can embrace where Apple is going with processes that cooperate with the new approach. In this session, learn the recent past, the current climate and features, and then where Apple is likely headed with their lockdown of macOS, and most importantly, how you as an IT professional can meet that challenge with your processes and systems. You will learn how systems including System Integrity Protection, Read Only Systems, GateKeeper and ProtectX impact your users and the administration of their systems.

Storage Strategy in 2020: NAS, Cloud, Hybrid, Secure

As an Apple professional, your users’ and clients’ needs are potentially different from the needs of other OSes. The average macOS user has bigger file stores, and throughput needs. But, at the same time, Apple users have to access Windows servers. With all demands today for access, services, cloud, and even backups and sync, you need to have a storage strategy. What do you need to consider? What Windows server solutions can you use to support macOS? What disk formats do you need to support? And, how does public cloud, private cloud, and hybrid cloud take part of your strategy? Finally, but far from least important, what about uptime demands, security, encryption, regulatory compliance, and more. Come learn about a modern storage strategy using cloud and NAS and how you can make it work for those you support.

Security Best Practices: VPNs, Human Hardening, Zero Trust, Email and More

In today’s hyper-connected, digital world, it’s never been more important to help users and clients protect and secure their data. While some regions have passed laws that make it easier for consumers to control at least some of their data — and who gets to use it — most people live at the whim of the corporations that collect their data. And everyone lives with the very real threat of wrongdoers. Every technologist and consultant should know that only some of this work is technical in nature. Much of it, frankly, is employing common sense approaches to how and when we use our technology. Small technical and behavioral changes can result in massive security and privacy changes… either for better or worse. In this session, we’ll talk about real world VPN solutions, human hardening, the importance of Zero Trust Networking, and messaging/email do’s and don’ts. In the end, you’ll walk away with methodologies and solutions you can act on, or at least consider, for those that you support.

plists: The ins, the outs, the dangers

Almost all ways one manages devices, whether directly or via an MDM or other management tool, is done in part at least via controlling and configuring the preferences and settings of a system’s plists. Preferences exist on all OS platforms and on macOS they have a .plist extension. In this session, we’ll learn about how plists are organized, how they behave, and how the multi domain system is traversed to read the different available plist files. We’ll talk about several tools which you can use to work with plist files. And, we’ll learn about the right way to see preferences and modify them. You’ll learn how a pro interacts with a system to understand the preferences assigned to a given application. We’ll explore how plist reading and interpretation can be incredibly useful for troubleshooting, configuration and reporting on systems as an administrator -- including how to create customized systems.

Modern Command Line: zsh, Swift & Best practices.

Apple has made it clear that bash is no longer its preference with zsh and Swift being the future. Starting with macOS Catalina, the standard is now zsh — Z Shell. At some point in the future, bash will not be installed by default on macOS. In this session, we’ll talk about the similarities and differences of zsh and bash. We’ll cover how you can install bash on a system that doesn’t have it installed, but more importantly, we’ll highlight the new features that zsh brings to the table. We’ll also talk about best practices in zsh, and the rich community resources available. We’ll also cover Apple’s updates to Swift, and its clear direction in the future for all Apple professionals. Come learn about the modern macOS command line, and the changes that will impact those supporting others.

Kernel and System Extensions: What you need to know.

macOS is changing from the inside out and it’s critical that those supporting Apple understand how the operating system works now, and how it is likely to work in the future. Knowing exactly when something fails can help you to know what process is failing, especially during start up. Apple has been warning strongly for years to stay away from writing kernel extensions — Kernel Extensions are going away, replaced by System Extensions and other system modification methods. Learn what makes a kernel extension a danger to the performance of your computer hardware (fans off, processor to full speed ahead!). Apple decided a while ago to deprecate network kernel extensions making them unsupported in Catalina, but that effort took years to accomplish. Learn what kinds of services were handled by network kernel extensions in previous versions of macOS, and how that landscape is shifting. Most importantly, learn the troubleshooting methods that give you the best chance of correcting unwanted behaviors caused by kernel extensions, system extensions, and other operating system modification tools installed by 3rd parties. As part of this exploration you will learn the practical differences between system extensions and kernel extensions and how those differences will affect how you do your work.

macOS Troubleshooting Tools and Tricks

With the changes and evolution of macOS, technologists need to keep up with not only the changes but the tools for managing and troubleshooting those changes. In this session, we’ll learn about the troubleshooting and other tools that should be in your toolbox, as well as some of the best tricks and methodologies for troubleshooting and supporting systems that have gone awry.

After Event Bonus: Convergence - What's Coming? What should you be Prepared for?

If one thing is clear, technology is converging -- and areas of responsibility including telecom, connectivity, IoT, and evening lighting are becoming more and more technology based. That means that they are either about to be the responsibility of IT, if not already, or will need to integrate with IT. In this talk, we’ll talk about this convergence, the possible dangers, and the opportunities for consultants, admins and IT Pros.