If you ever received your older sibling’s “hand-me-down” clothes as a kid, you know that was bad enough. They didn’t fit quite right. They were already out of style. And they were probably patched and stitched from bad decisions that you would /never/ have made yourself.

But what about taking over a complex, highly technical system? One that has been running for years. One that you had no hand in creating and has been maintained by one (or more) people with mindsets completely different from your own.

Maybe it has workflows were designed for a time when your organization was much smaller and no longer fit quite right for your current size. There are packages and scripts are out of date and might even “clash” with the currently supported macOS versions. And it’s probably full of things that were stitched together and patched up in an emergency with the best of intentions to fix later, but it never happened.

In this session, I’ll describe my experience taking over a seven year old Jamf Pro deployment that had seen a half dozen part-time, full-time, and contract admins over the years. …including me. I’ll talk about the issues that I knew about going in and the ones that completely blindsided me.

I’ll talk about the solutions I used to bring things (more) under control, including those provided by Jamf, the Jamf Nation community, and the ones I created myself out of thin air. And I'll provide resources I created to help manage devices and workflows including scripts and even a 3D printing file.