I Went to EUC World Independence

October 27, 2024bytheDXT

EUC World Independence is a two-day EUC (End User Computing) conference from October 22nd to October 23rd in Silver Spring, Maryland, USA. This was the world premier of the EUC World conference, and I was able to attend it.

World of EUC hosted EUC World Independence. If you haven’t heard of World of EUC, it is an independent organization that was formed to bridge the gap between all the vendors and technology and community programs in the EUC space. They aim to be a one-stop shop to connect everything and remain independent from all vendors, as there are a lot of vendors in the EUC space.

In this post, I will detail my experience at EUC World 2024.

Getting to Silver Spring

Getting to Silver Spring, Maryland, USA, is a bit challenging when travelling from Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The original plan was a flight from Calgary to Montreal, Quebec, Canada and then a 90-minute layover to a connecting flight from Montreal to Washington, DC, USA.

The morning began with a notification from the airline saying that the flight from Calgary to Montreal was delayed by 2 hours. This presented a problem as the connection flight would be missed, I wouldn’t get to the event until the next day, and I would miss a large chunk of the first day of the event.

Fortunately, I was travelling with my friend Stephen Wagner (who also has a blog), an expert at dealing with airline chaos. He got the airline to transfer things around, and now we’d be flying from Calgary to Toronto, Ontario, Canada, then Toronto to Washington.

On the flight, I got free food. I had never eaten on a plane before, and it was pretty good. I wonder why comedians always make fun of airplane food. I ordered the butter chicken option.

By the time we reached the hotel, it was 11:30 pm Maryland time.

Day 1

The first day of the conference started with complimentary breakfast, registration, and then the EUC World conference started.

On my way to the event, I ran into Holly Lehman, one of the people who runs the Omnissa Tech Insider program that I am a part of.

The first day of EUC World took place at the AFI Silver Theatre.

I got registered and picked up my badge.

It was neat that the day one took place at a theatre. I thought a theatre was an odd place to host a conference, but when you think about it, it makes sense as every room has many seats and projectors. The only thing you need to bring is the presentation. I suspect that helps simplify a lot.

As this was the first EUC World, it was much smaller than some of the other conferences I’ve been to, which also meant there were fewer choose-your-own sessions, but that was a good thing as the whole event felt a lot more intimate.

The main presentations and the keynotes took place in the main theatre.

After the main presentations, there was an option to choose your session. The session I selected was called Ctrl+Z! The Universal Application Lifecycle for Modern Virtual and Physical Environments with App Portability hosted by Jeff Ulatoski. Going into this session, I didn’t know much about app portability.

App portability is extremely interesting as it fundamentally changes how you look at applications and how you deploy them. Traditionally, you install applications directly onto the systems, but what if you didn’t have to do that? What if you could make the computer think that the application was installed, and the end user or the system wouldn’t know any different? That’s what app portability is all about.

With app portability, you gain even more centralized management of the applications. Since the applications aren’t technically installed, it can make rolling back an application to an old version as easy as the user logging out and in again.

The next session I attended was Automation Framework Windows Image Creation on Microsoft Azure for Citrix / AVD, hosted by Dane Young. This session was fascinating because it showed how you could automate the entire image creation and deployment with PowerShell. I love it when things are automated, especially when they use PowerShell.

At the start of Dane’s session, he asked the audience to try and “stump the chump”, meaning he wanted to see if the audience could ask a question that he didn’t know the answer to. I noticed that the framework he presented heavily used MDT (Microsoft Deployment Toolkit) and was used with Windows 11.

Currently, Microsoft has said that MDT is not supported with Windows 11. Yes, it technically still works, but there’s a growing risk that it will eventually break, and my question was about how he plans to handle the fact that MDT is currently deprecated for Windows 11, as I was hoping he knew something I didn’t and had a solution. He didn’t. I stumped him.

Day 2

The second day of EUC World Independence took place in the DoubleTree hotel rather than the AFI Silver Theatre. Day 2 started with a keynote and then transitioned into choose your sessions.

The first choose-your-own session I attended was called Year of MSIX, hosted by Tim Mangan. This session was interesting because it dived deeper into the world of MSIX. I’ve worked very little with MSIX, but MSIX is starting to take over the world as the preferred deployment method by some vendors.

The next session I attended was called Zero to Non-Persistent Desktops in Fifteen Minutes, hosted by Joe Cooper. I chose this session because I’m very familiar with managing standard systems and persistent VDI but have yet to dive into non-persistent VDIs.

What’s interesting about non-persistent VDIs is that a lot of what is done to manage persistent systems can be applied to non-persistent systems. The primary variable that non-persistent introduces is the user’s data, which can be handled with redirected folders and/or FSLogix. The other variable is the applications. You can put most of them in your golden image, but the ones with a limited user count don’t make sense to put in the golden image, this is where app portability comes into play, as you can use app portability technologies to make systems think that applications are installed when they aren’t.

Next was the unconference portion for day two. An unconference is where attendees can pitch their ideas for a talk or a panel. The topics can be anything, and they don’t have to relate to the subject of the conference. The attendees will vote on which ones they want to see, and the winners will get to present. This is a really cool concept that I’ve never heard of before.

The first unconference session was about AI, and it was like an ask the experts anything type of session. The experts in this case were Brian Madden, Stephen Wagner, and Sean Massey (who also has a blog). Seeing everyone’s perspectives about AI and its uses was really cool.

One of the unconference sessions was a discussion about home labs. The people who attended were Kees Baggerman, Jarian Gibson, Owen Reynolds, Stephen Wagner, Joe Cooper, myself and a few others. It was exciting to hear about what everyone is doing with their home labs and the challenges they’ve faced and solved. This session was one of my favorite ones.

The unconference sessions brought day 2 to a close, officially ending EUC World 2024. Due to the smaller scale of the event, that didn’t mean everything was done. It was just done on paper, many of us met up at the hotel bar and had further conversations about everything ranging from AI to MFA. I really enjoyed that due to the event’s smaller scale, everyone was just there, and you could talk to anyone.

Summary

All in EUC World Independence was a blast. I had so much fun and met so many people. I think I met more people at EUC World than I did at larger conferences. The whole vibe of EUC World felt much more intimate.

I highly recommend checking out World of EUC if you work in the EUC space or want to learn more about EUC technologies. Also, you should check out EUC World 2025 whenever and wherever it is. It is sure to be a lot of fun, I’m already looking forward to it.

Travelling Home

Usually, I would’ve just ended this post with the summary, but my travel home was unique enough that it needs its own section. On the way home, my flights were from Washington to Montreal and Montreal to Calgary.

On my flight from Montreal to Calgary, I was upgraded to business class. The airplane I was on was a Boeing Dreamliner, and everyone in business class had their own personal like pods.

Flying in business class on a Dreamliner was amazing. You have so much room, and the pods have many fancy features.

The controls for your TV look like a Sony PSP.

You can even recline the seat fully horizontal. I had no idea that was even possible. I almost fell asleep on my flight, and that never happens. I fully understand how people can legit sleep on an airplane if they are flying business class.

The peanuts they bring you are slightly warmed. I had no idea that was a thing. Also, when did planes start handing out peanuts again? I thought they were banned because lots of people are allergic to them.

The food is free too and is actually good. The drinks are also free and bottomless. They refiled mine quite a few times, which I did not expect.

Traveling business class with pods was epic, so much luxury. I hope to experience it again in the future.

I think this picture sums up my feelings about business class travel.