John Quirk's Blog

This video post runs through the creation of deployment types in ConfigMgr 2012 Beta 1. New to this release is Configuration Manager’s ability to control how the application is consumed, at runtime. This video blog runs through creation of deployment types, dependencies and the scenario-based selection of the deployment type at runtime.

Configuration Manager 2012 provides new functionality for handling multiple package types. The Config Manager Deployment Types replace advertisements and are sensitive to the context at runtime on the user device. If the user is logged on to a machine which is not their primary device, the agent can choose how to provision the application, App-V OR MSI, etc…

This video runs through the process of creating an App-V deployment type and shows the options for auto-installation of dependent apps and deployment type selection based on user-type.

A colleague of mine, Andy Sallabank has been participating in the ConfigMgr 2012 CEP and has been getting the inside track on some good stuff. This irked me somewhat, so to redress the balance I have registered myself. Andy has posted some good stuff on his blog around the new features to participate in the CEP, so not to be outdone, I am doing the same; so as part of a series looking at features in ConfigMgr 2012 Beta 1, I thought I would start by looking at client health thresholds. (Why not!?!?!?)

In the monitoring section of the console we can now pull up statistics on client health. Below you can see a report showing my SLA threshold, and the percentage of clients which met the threshold. This stuff is all integrated into the console, which meets with my approval.

I can go in and tweak SLA settings….

As well as do some pretty cool AD integration that allows us to determine when inactive clients last logged into their domain…

Anyone who is currently a ConfigMgr admin will rejoice! Or something, We all have our vbscripts, dudeworks tools and bits of for /f scripts we use for these tasks outside of the console. Maintaining a healthy client base is a full time job. With these things built in, and with auto-remediation to come, we finally have something on the horizon to eliminate some of the frustration of working with SMS!

All this stuff appears to be in its infancy, but from what I have heard and saw briefly at Tech Ed, I am expecting some really great things!

It’s not often that I’m moved to eulogise a piece of software, especially something that sounds so innocuous, but the latest release of Snag-It (version 10) is an awesome piece of software, particularly for us tecchies writing technical documentation.

I’ve been a Snag-It user since version 8, paying a small fee for the major upgrades along the way. Snag-It is a screen-grabbing piece of software and has several major features which, if you’ve not seen the product are worth mentioning quickly:

· Multiple Capture Modes – Full Screen, Free Hand, Fixed Region, Time Delayed, include cursor, etc., etc., it also provides for capture of webpages with links, text capture, scrolling page capture. It goes on and on.

· Multiple Output Modes – Clipboard, File (every format you can imagine), output direct to a running application (direct into Word for example)

· Snag-It Editor – Crop, trim, annotate, blur, Spotlight and Magnify. It does that border stuff to make your page look torn and can add watermarks. The editor will by default automatically keep a copy of each captured image, this means you can be lazy, capture every shot you need in quick succession and stick them into your doc later.

New in version 10 is support for transparency, some new Editor features (page curl, cut-out effects) but in particular the screen magnifier and smart capture options are superb.

Pressing the Capture button (or Print Screen key) places a new screen magnifier (so you can see precisely where you capture region starts and ends) on the screen.

Magically the cursor auto selects the capture target, hover over a menu icon and the object itself will be the capture target, move outside of this and the whole menu bar becomes the target, then the child screen, finally the whole application window. Click and drag and this targeting is overridden by the regional sect option. It works seamlessly resulting in a much reduced amount of cropping required and a much slicker capture experience.

There’s a free 30 day trial available from www.TechSmith.com well, well worth a look.

We’re working on an Office 2010 deployment for a customer, so, naturally, the first thing to do is put In Configuration Manager. Having successfully deployed the hierarchy and installed the Configuration Manager agent across all the workstations we have a requirement to assess the compatibility of plugins to the current Office 2003 estate.

The tool for the job is the Office Environment Assessment Tool (OEAT)

Using the “Settings Wizard” we can create an unattended package deployable with Configuration Manager. This package results in a load of XML files deposited onto a shared folder. These, when interrogated with the OEAT creates an Excel report:

These add-ins are then broken down into those supplied with Office vs 3rd Party add-ins. Along with raw data and hardware configuration (including graphs!).

As an answer to “what plug-ins do I have out there”, this is a neat solution.

I want to add another pie chart to the defaults on the rather lovely Configuration Manager Dashboard. I’ve already installed the product, which is very straightforward, so connect to the dashboard and click Site Actions – Edit Page…

This displays a hidden web part

Enter a name for your new “Dataset”, here I’m using ComputerModels.xml.

Expand out the Dataset section and add your SQL server name and Configuration Manager database name.

Now add your SQL query. I just want a pie chart of my computer models, so a simple query will suffice:

Select top 10 v_GS_COMPUTER_SYSTEM.Model0 as Model, COUNT(*) AS ‘Count’ FROM v_GS_COMPUTER_SYSTEM
GROUP BY v_GS_COMPUTER_SYSTEM.Model0 ORDER BY Count(*)

Click to Validate your query, then expand out the Chart section

I want a pie chart called Computer Models, fill in the boxes and click Save and Close.

Now all that’s needed is to add the newly created dataset to a web part. Click “Add a Web Part” on the page where you wish to display your lovely new chart.

Select Microsoft Dashboard Viewer from the list of webparts

This will add a blank web part to your site:

Click Edit and select “Modify Shared Web Part”

In the right hand pane, click in the “Select Dataset” box and select the ComputerModels.xml we just created

Apply this change and click the Home link on the top of the page and you’re done!

A quick update for anyone who hasn’t already seen enough of me (or Carl). The interview with Jeff Wettlaufer mentioned below is now online on the System Center blog – Nexus One, for your , I dunno, enjoyment.

We also have a new website at http://www.Orinoko.co.uk I am certain this will be a permanent work in progress, but it is an improvement over our previous one at any rate.