Observations and stuff I find interesting – mostly about System Center
2010-12-05 Leave a comment
Each year Las Vegas hosts the extremely popular Microsoft Management Summit (MMS). This is the premier event for anyone whose career includes responsibility for products like SCCM, SCOM, SCSM, or others in the System Center suite of products. Read more of this post
2010-11-21 Leave a comment
I’m frequently asked which ports are used by Configuration Manager.
Configuration Manager distributes services between the Site Server, Site Systems and Clients. Some of the ports used by Configuration Manager are configurable while others are not. When planning your firewall configurations, you will need to determine which services will require which ports. Microsoft documents all of the ports used on their Ports Used by Configuration Manager page.
2010-11-07 Leave a comment
Hey folks, if you would like to test drive the beta of the next version of Configuration Manager, Microsoft’s VHD Test Drive program has a fully configured SCCM VNext VHD available for download here.
2010-10-06 2 Comments
Today Microsoft Learning announced the official release of course 6451B: Planning, Deploying and Managing Microsoft® System Center Configuration Manager 2007 on October 5, 2010. The course will be available for order by Learning Partners on October 27, 2010.
Course Syllabus can be accessed at http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/Course.aspx?ID=6451B.
What is new? This course has been revised significantly from the original release of 6451, and updated to include both SCCM R2 and R3 features. It’s a great course!
2010-08-26 Leave a comment
Configuration Manager provides remarkable troubleshooting log files. Both Configuration Manager servers and Configuration Manager clients log pretty much everything they do, and these log files are a wealth of troubleshooting information. Microsoft maintains a complete List of Log File in Configuration Manager at their technet site. I’ll be posting more about log files soon.
2010-08-23 Leave a comment
Microsoft is providing a fully configured virtual machine running Windows Server 2008 R2 and SCCM v.Next. Just follow the link to download the test VM.
2010-08-23 Leave a comment
Was reading a great how-to article today on Steve Rachui’s Manageability blog. It’s a sample proof of concept only, you would have to tweak it to work the way you want it to, but it has some great potential. Why would you want to drive imaging from the command line? One compelling reason – you don’t want the team responsible for delivering image to have access to the SCCM Console. Users could visit a web page to have an OSD image delivered. Very cool!
You’ll find the whole article at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/steverac/archive/2010/08/23/os-imaging-via-web-page.aspx.
2010-06-01 Leave a comment
6451B “Planning, Deploying, and Managing Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager R2″, the revised version of the 6451 course, is now available in Beta. The original 6451A was a good course, based on the original RTM version of SCCM. The B version is now updated to include R2 version features.
Students will learn most of the material that was included in the original 6451A, with the addition of the following new content; Read more of this post
2010-05-25 Leave a comment
Yesterday Microsoft released the beta 1 version of the next generation of SCCM. Check out some of the cool new features, including links to the beta download at http://blogs.technet.com/b/systemcenter/archive/2010/05/24/the-next-generation-of-client-management.aspx.
2010-05-05 Leave a comment
I stumbled upon this today – missed the announcements. The System Center Configuration Manager team has released V2 of the ConfigMgr toolkit.
One significant tool that I notice has be re-released in this version of the toolkit is the Management Point Troubleshooter Tool. I used it today to evaluate my management point on my Server 2008 R2 Site Server to ensure it was correctly installed. The MP Troubleshooter tool will do a pre and post MP install check, and notify you of any problems it identifies. In this version of the troubleshooter, it can even detect WebDAV rules and if necessary can provide automated fixes.
You can download the toolkit here.
Configuration Manager Team Blog
Yet Another System Center Blog 