I'm Rob Marshall, a consultant who specialises in the Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager product. I like to share, i do so by blogging and helping out when I can in the MS SMS newsgroups and participating in the ConfigMgr MVP program.
I was awarded and joined the program in 2009. It'd be an understatement to say it has to be one of the best experiences an IT engineer can have, if they really enjoy specialising in a product.
My biggest weapon for troubleshooting is, my formidable knowledge, no, only joking, you, the community. I find if I cannot answer a question, then I can usually find the answer from using Bing\Google, pouring over the documentation, and if that doesn't work, tinkering in mine or someone elses virtual lab.
The blogs pretty much about ConfigMgr, but it is also a platform for me to express my random urges to display something I've stumbled across, and that I imagine would entertain you or what not as equally as it did me.
System Center 2012 Configuration Manager now has an extra quiver in its bow, its entire technical Documentation Library has been prepared and made available for offline viewing in three formats (CHM, DOCX and PDF).
A few have asked where the Kindle version is … The doc team didn’t create one, they chose the three most common formats a ConfigMgr head would encounter. Producing a Kindle-friendly version is easy to do, just down one of the file formats and convert it with one of the many popular Kindle format converters that are out there.
Ideally you’d install the CHM (pronounced Chum!) onto any station with the ConfigMgr Console installation, or if you just like the CHM format, and the DOC and PDF are destined to portable, take and use anywhere due to their extensive support across multiple platforms.
This is an offline version of a living document library, your only as current knowledge-wise as the offline versions you’ve downloaded. if in doubt, visit the source of this information, the online Documentation Library itself.
I recommend any serious ConfigMgr admin be very familiar with the docs. Obvious I know, but a lot of folks don’t rock up to the docs until the last which is a big shame as most often your answer is in there …
I gave k2pdfopt a run just now to see how it’d get on converting the PDF. It took a while, but it produced a result without barfing. I don’t have a Kindle so don’t know what the resulting file will look like, I think I’ll go buy a Kindle just for my offline doc needs!
I went to buy a Kindle today so I could read PDF and DOC files on the hoof, but, after checking out the Touch I knew its latency would begin working on me ... So I picked up the Samsung Galaxy S3 instead, it has a larger screen than the S2, and using Adobe Reader for Android I could easily navigate and search the offline PDF.
The S3 delivers enough power to make it a very approachable, fluid experience. Ticked this off my list, offline reading is a breeze for me now, I'll always have the S3 on hand but the Kindle I won't travel with constantly.