Tim Hassett, Appogee

Tim Hassett is the Co Founder of Appogee, a firm whose focus is on delivering an Apple strategy to medium and large organizations. He has over 12 years of experience in serving enterprise clients from an Apple perspective, and collaborating with Apple to do this. The tremendous growth of iOS and OS X has led to a broadening of Appogee’s client base, and rapid growth of the company. Tim has lived within, and adapted to the ever-changing Apple market and ecosystem. Tim grew up in Annapolis, MD, holds a Computer Information Systems degree from High Point University, and lives in Orlando FL with his wife, identical twin baby girls, and son.

Chad Swarthout, Alectrona, LLC

Chad Swarthout has been supporting PCs and Macs for nearly 10 years, initially sales & hardware repairs, later supporting small business servers, workstations, mobile devices. More recently, Chad is consulting for IT firms looking to expand their Mac practice in order to integrate Macs & iOS devices into Windows server environments. He is currently CEO of Alectrona, a DC area Apple Consultant, and Senior Solutions Engineer for Mac Business Solutions. Chad is originally from Chicago, holds a degree in Economics from George Washington University, and currently lives here in Arlington, Virginia.

Mark Meszaros, Digitial Industry

Mark Meszaros - Entrepreneur, CEO, CTO, – Mark initiated or participated in the founding of numerous companies, guiding these organizations as a corporate manager and technical director. These companies have spanned industries from commercial aviation to information technology services and have included boot strap and venture funded startup entities. Mark is a corporate leader with a business degree and is a senior information technologies (IT) professional with 20 years of experience in guiding businesses in their IT landscape. He has overseen, engineered and developed service offerings in the areas of Voice and Data communications. These have included service for small and medium companies as well as global corporate network environments, application service hosting, and cloud based service environments. International experience includes projects in many countries and regions in the Americas, Europe, and Africa. He is bilingual in English and German. Mark is presently the CEO for a Silver Spring, MD based Managed Service Provider, Digital Industry, whose focus is predominately the SMB market in the Washington DC area. Over the course of his career Mark has remained very technically involved with clients acting as a mentor and teacher to dozens of IT professionals over the last decade.

Allen Hancock, The Orchard Solutions

Allen Hancock received his Bachelor's in Early Childhood Education at the University of Missouri - Columbia. This background in education keeps him coming back to MacTech. In 2000, Allen started the Mac Consulting Group, Inc: an Apple Specialist and Authorized Training Center based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. There, he found his thrill in helping clients make the most of their computing experiences. In 2012, Allen sold the Mac Consulting Group to The Orchard, where he continue to do what he loves most: help make happy customers. Over the course of his career, he met too many people as they suffered a failing hard drive without a current backup. As a means of preventing such loss, Allen founded Watchman Monitoring, Inc. Its namesake product is a Software as a Service tool which allows service providers to address such problems before it’s too late.

Justin Esgar, Virtua Computers Inc, & Autriv Software Development

Justin Esgar is a returning speaker to MacTech, having presented at both Los Angeles and DC over the last few years. He has devoted his career to all things Mac, owning both Virtua Computers, a Mac consulting company in New York City, as well as Autriv Software Development, the company behind the apps SignMyPad, NYC Truck Food, and Homebase, as well as OSX-based Blackbook and the new Email Phoenix. With SignMyPad alone, Autriv has been featured in numerous publications, including documentation directly from Apple for being one of the most useful business apps on the market. When he’s not speaking about the accessibility of software development, overseeing consulting clients, or working on the next big idea, Justin can be found at home in New Jersey with his mini labradoodle Rusty and his wife Michelle.

Tim Meehan, 21stCentury:graphics

Tim Meehan has over 30 years’ experience as a professional graphic designer, illustrator, author and trainer. Providing graphic support services in design and illustration to a broad range of national and international clients like Apple Computer, Inc., McGraw/Hill Aviation Week Group, Mobil Coal Producing, Inc. and The National Science Foundation Office of Polar Programs.

Nanther Thangarajah, greenfieldbelser

Nanther got into trouble at a young age. Driven with an insatiable curiosity for “How Stuff Works”, he has been asking questions, taking things apart and sharing knowledge with the people around him for more than 25 years. Having previously managed the help desk at American University, being the network and systems administrator for their newspaper and providing technical consulting for the likes of MetLife, Emigrant Bank, Avanti Press and Steven Meisel Studios, he brings all his experience and knowledge to bear in his current endeavor as IT Director for Greenfield/Belser.

Brian Govatos, Microsoft Senior Trainer

Brian Govatos is a Senior Trainer for Microsoft who has also been heavily involved in the Apple community since 2006. From 2006 to 2009, he was a Mac consultant for several small business clients in Las Vegas. With a passion for communicating ideas, Brian loves to discuss technology and to inspire users to make the most out of it.

Sessions

Sessions are 30-50 minutes long, with most sessions are about 40 minutes. There are nine sessions in the 2013 curriculum.

Topics Covered

The topics covered will include:

• Overview of What are the Key Building Blocks for Today's Apple Consultant
• Mobility and Profiles
• Local Storage, Network Storage, Backups
• Networks and Routing
• The World of Apple IDs
• DNS
• Microsoft Office: Feature and Deployment Options
• Command Line
• Deployment
• and more...

Read on for more details.

Keynote:
How Do the Key Building Blocks for Today's Consultant Fit Together

What does today's Apple consultant need to know to be effective in serving everyone from small business to Enterprise, support personnel, or even home users and networks.

Mobility and Profiles

Who owns the data on your mobile device? How do you keep sensitive data from getting into the wrong hands? What do you do when you blur the lines between personal and business needs for a phone? At an increasing rate, clients and staff need help managing mobile devices. They need to keep their data secure, and give users the features and access they want, and they want to do so without compromising. There are a variety of ways to accomplish these goals. Learn about mobility, profiles, and the steps you can take to find the right solution for their needs.

Local Storage, Network Storage, Backups

Data is growing faster and larger than ever before. SSDs, Fusion drives, cloud, and network are just a few buzz words of the day. Do you know the proper use for each? Do you know your options for connecting storage? Do you know how to serve your backup needs properly? Learn about storage area networks vs. network attached storage, backup options and critical knowledge for keeping data safe.

Networks and Routing

Networks: Can't live with them, can't live without them -- they often are plagued with invisible, black box problems, yet need to be working 24/7. Are you trying to design a network that should not be seen nor heard about? Do you have the knowledge to eliminate or identify network issues in tackling a problem? Are you ready for what IPv6 is going to do to every network, everywhere? Learn about network design and troubleshooting from the ground up, and see a great example of what a common small business network should look like.

The World of Apple IDs

Apple is continually changing the rules for Apple IDs, iTunes accounts, and more. Learn the latest rules, how devices are treated, migrating to new hardware, dealing with multiple IDs, and iCloud. Find out how iTunes Match works, how Mac App Store differs from iTunes, and the right way for working with deployment and imaging. Learn the restrictions for merging Apple IDs and how to combine them.

DNS

There is one technology that is core to how all other technologies today work. It affects email, web, file servers, databases and in short, just about everything. As a core technology, it's often the cause of so many problems -- or as one of our sessions chairs says "It's Always DNS®". In this session, you'll learn not only about the most important parts of today's DNS, but also some of the best examples of how you can use DNS as a tool, debug, and finally, find additional resources and information about domain name services.

Microsoft Office: Feature and Deployment Options

Microsoft Office is at the core of how people work, yet many people don't know what Office for Mac can do, let alone take advantage of it. Did you know that Office includes collaborative editing features both through the web and the cloud? Or that Office can be deployed in a variety of ways, and licenses used on more than one computer? Do you know which Office features that help people work the most efficiently? Learn from Microsoft experts how you can not only make the most of Office for yourself, but those that you support.

Command Line

Because the Mac has such an intuitive user interface, many consultants forget about the power of the command line -- which can often accomplish something faster, or more easily. Sometimes, it's the only way to accomplish certain things. Learn about how the command line works, the best way to use man pages, and scripts. Walk away with real examples and useful tips.

Deployment

How do you stop doing the same thing over and over again? How do you help someone get a number of computers ready for use very quickly? Deployment and management of devices, disk images, and packages are often the critical solution. And, yesterday's best practices are quickly being replaced by new methodologies. Learn about deployment options, imaging, packages and the tools you need to be productive and efficient.