“This is the best community in tech,” Beth Tschida said during the opening keynote at JNUC 2026. After a week in Kansas City, we couldn’t agree more.
From the happy hour before the show opened to conversations at Booth 602, Taylor’s sessions, dinners and plenty of time around the claw machine, people were incredibly open about what was working for their teams and what was still harder than it needed to be.find
A lot of our conversations centered around device support and, more specifically, everything that happens before an admin can actually take action.
The work that happens before the fix
The device action itself is often the easy part. The work leading up to it is where things get more complicated.
Before an admin can take action, they may need to identify the right device, understand what happened, check what’s already been tried and gather the right context.
A locked-out Mac is a good example. The fix itself may be straightforward, but first someone still needs to verify the employee, confirm the device and understand what has already happened.
That’s where Ravenna can help. By bringing the request, context and device information together in Slack, Ravenna reduces the time IT teams spend gathering information and working through repetitive steps, giving them that time back to focus on the work that needs their attention.
What we showed at JNUC
Taylor Halliday, Ravenna’s CEO and co-founder, spoke twice during the week, with a lightning session on September 23 followed by a longer session the next morning.
Across the two sessions, he walked through how a device support request can move from an employee’s initial message in Slack through to resolution.
We also ran the demo throughout the week at Booth 602, which gave us more time to talk through the workflows people were already using.
What made those booth conversations especially useful was how quickly they became specific. People would bring up the requests their teams deal with every day, walk us through how they handle them now and point out the steps that still feel unnecessarily manual.
That gave us a much better sense of where teams actually want automation to help, and where they still want an admin involved.
Starting the week with the Jamf community
The night before the show floor opened, we co-hosted a happy hour at Ricochet Social with Workbrew and the Mac Admins Foundation.
It was packed, and it ended up being a great way to start the week. We caught up with people we already knew, met plenty of new faces and had some of the first conversations that continued throughout the rest of JNUC.
After Day 1, we hosted the Ravenna Supper Club with a smaller group of IT leaders. Having more time around the table gave us a chance to go deeper on some of the same topics we were hearing on the show floor, including how teams are handling internal support today, where they’re still relying on manual processes and what they’re interested in automating next.
One of the things that stood out throughout the week was how willing people were to share what they had learned with one another.
The claw machine was a hit
The Ravenna belt bags and Jibbitz quickly became the prizes everyone wanted, and people kept coming back to the booth for another attempt. We even saw some negotiating and trading happening around the prizes.
By the last day, a few people stopped while we were packing up just to tell us they were glad we had brought it, which was a pretty good way to end the show.
If you missed your shot at JNUC, keep an eye out for us at future events. The claw machine will likely be making another appearance.
Until next time
JNUC gave us a lot to think about, but more than anything, it reinforced how much knowledge gets shared within the Jamf community.
Thank you to Jamf for bringing everyone together, to Workbrew and the Mac Admins Foundation for helping us kick off the week, and to everyone who stopped by Booth 602, came to one of Taylor’s sessions, joined us for dinner or spent some time talking with our team.
We left Kansas City with a better understanding of the support workflows IT teams are dealing with every day, along with plenty of ideas and conversations we’re excited to keep going.
Didn’t make it to Booth 602?
If you missed Taylor’s sessions or didn’t get a chance to stop by, we’re happy to walk you through the device support workflow we showed at JNUC.
Bring a request your team handles today and we can talk through what that workflow could look like with Ravenna.
