Attended a session on WebDAV today, which I’ve thought of implementing to allow students remote access to their files. The session itself wasn’t awesome (the speaker from Thursby was dry as a bone) but I did learn that there’s little advantage to deploying WebDAV unless you have a specific need to provide collaborative behaviors in the filesystem. NFS and SMB are just as universally supported across operating systems, and client implementations are more mature. On the other hand, if you do WebDAV now you’re ready for whatever collaborative things your peeps come up with in the future. It was interesting to see what Adobe has done – all of their new generation apps have a “Workgroup” menu item with special options built in to connect to and work with WebDAV volumes shared by groups. Very forward-thinking.
Next attended a seminar on NetBoot and got more than I bargained for. Wanted to learn the fundamentals of disk imaging and restoration, either locally from FireWire drives or over the network, but they assumed an audience with 10 years experience using rsync, revrdist, ASR, and friends – it was the most technical Mac conference I’ve been to. The author of Carbon Copy Cloner was on the panel – fascinating guy, and so committed. Good timing – I’m about to image and restore all the Greenhouse Macs, and this was a perfect intro.
More than 90% of people who attend trade shows just wander the booths, never go to the seminars, but there are so many smart people running the sessions. If you can pull the bread together, it’s usually worth it.