JAMF Casper Certified Expert

CCE Course Overview
Back in early May 2014, I attended (and passed!) one of the first JAMF Casper Certified Expert (CCE) courses outside of the USA.
Mike and Rob (funnily enough, from JAMF) hosted this in the lovely city of Amsterdam near the location of their new(-ish) European support offices.
It is a 4 day course covering all manner of advanced and unusual aspects of configuration, maintaining and troubleshooting Casper based solutions.
As seems to be a reoccurring theme with the JAMF guys, the course was unusual and the examination method strange. The entire course was more a gathering of experienced Casper users / administrators to show off our different methods of tackling the various scenarios proposed and sharing out ideas, much like a conference (such as JNUC – JAMF Nation Users Conference). However this was also interspersed with classroom lessons and exercises.
I also found it a great opportunity to put a few faces to names (such as Ben Toms of the Mac Mule Blog).
My History
Some of you have read my history from one of my previous blogs so I’ll try not to re-tread old ground!
With the advent of Profile Manager and the increase in SCCM capabilities, Mac Admin’s were after a solution that would provide the same functionality, specifically the increased abilities to push out software and updates, as well as advanced reporting and management functionalities. It was my boss, David Acland who led the charge to use JAMF’s Casper solution, thereby meeting these needs for our customers.
Over the next 18-24 months I was provided the opportunity to install and configure from scratch two education sector Casper deployments, both managing between 300 and 600 Macs, as well as assist with maintenance and health checks of another four customer’s sites, three of which being our customer’s, with a fourth ad-hoc, all of which allowed me to both expand my knowledge and experience, and share those qualities with our customers and our internal staff.
With JAMF’s release of their two top qualification courses outside of the USA (CCE and CJA – Certified JSS Administrator), David felt that we both had sufficient experience and knowledge to take the challenge of obtaining these ‘next-level’ certifications, and to gain even more knowledge along the way.
The Future
In the future, I plan to use my new knowledge to continually expand and improve our customer’s Casper deployments and solutions, and continually offer advice where I can, all the time continuing to gain further knowledge and experience. With the CCE course, I now feel more confident with planning and implementing large-scale solutions, and develop solutions utilising advanced tools, such as the REST API tools.
Additionally, and arguably more importantly, I have found new contacts and fellow Mac Admins whom are willing to also share their experiences and solutions either through the use of blogs, and conferences (again JNUC).
Summary
So that’s what I’ve been up to for the last while! I hope it gives you some insight into how we at Amsys work internally, and what JAMF’s CCE offers.
How about your experiences, qualifications, good courses? Casper or Non-Casper? Let us know in the comments below and I’ll try to respond to as many as I can.