An Application Request with a lot of System Center Power via Orchestrator, ServiceMgr and ConfigMgr

As it Christmas, I wanted to do something special. That’s why dove into the world of ServiceMgr and came up with this long blog post about a combination of ConfigMgr, Orchestrator and ServiceMgr. This blog post will describe a configuration for a software request via the ServiceMgr Portal. I’m not going to say that I like the ServiceMgr Portal more than the Application Catalog of ConfigMgr, because I really don’t, but I do think it fits better within the processes of a company. Besides that, if it doesn’t fit, it can be customized. High Level Overview Like I stated the software request can be done via the ServiceMgr Portal. The portal will display applications that are imported, and after that filtered, via the ConfigMgr Connector. …

Read more

An overview of my posts about ConfigMgr 2012 SP1

Let’s start my first post, of this new year, with an overview of my latest post about ConfigMgr 2012 Service Pack (SP) 1. Normally I’m not really the kind of person that looks back, but in this case it’s with a reason, as most of my posts where with pre-release versions of SP1. I also tried to sort all my posts per subject, even though sometimes there is some overlap. The following posts are all tested, this week, with the RTM version of SP1 and I can confirm that they are still working: System Center Orchestrator Tweeting the deployment status of a system via Orchestrator and ConfigMgr 2012 Using a Status Filter Rule to delete a collection membership via Orchestrator and ConfigMgr 2012 New and …

Read more

Tweeting the deployment status of a system via Orchestrator and ConfigMgr 2012

Only a few days before Christmas I thought it would be fun to just create something extra cool for this weeks blog post. I thought about something that would be different, but also useful in some way. So I started thinking about how I would like to get my deployment status messages, as I like to start my deployments without checking them al the time, and I came to Twitter. I’ve got my tweets everywhere, on my phone, my tablet, my laptop, etc. So wouldn’t it be cool to get the deployment status messages on twitter? Prerequisites Now I decided that I want to show how to tweet the deployment status of a task sequence, there are two methods to do that and I will …

Read more

New and Improved: Pre-provision user applications during OS deployment via Orchestrator and ConfigMgr 2012

Last week I did a post about pre-provisioning user applications, based on group membership, during OS deployment, which I already thought was pretty cool. I got some nice positive feedback on that post, including a comment of my very well respected colleague and ConfigMgr MVP Kim Oppalfens. He said, “Nice find, but what if you have twenty applications?”. Well, my idea of last week would mean two task sequence steps per applications, so that’s not really an option for a lot of applications… I had to come up with something better. The biggest challenge about this is that Orchestrator can only return static variables, it’s not possible to return dynamically named variables from a runbook. This meant that the only option left, to really achieve …

Read more

Pre-provision user applications, based on group membership, during OS deployment via Orchestrator and ConfigMgr 2012

This week it’s time for another, in my opinion, very cool post with the combination of Orchestrator and ConfigMgr 2012 (and MDT 2012 Update 1). In this post I want to use the user, set with User Device Affinity, to pre-provision applications, based on group membership, on a device during the initial deployment of the device. Out-of-the-box User Device Affinity can be used to pre-deploy user-targeted application to a device and it can be set during the deployment of a device. This way it will start receiving applications very quick after the deployment. Basically I’m going to show in this post how to set User Device Affinity via a task sequence and how to use that username to install only specific applications for that user …

Read more

Using the power of Orchestrator to move a computer to a different OU via ConfigMgr 2012

The power of Orchestrator 2012 to automate actions is getting bigger and bigger, as the community for it grows and by that the number of Integration Packs (IPs). Of course there are also IPs for ConfigMgr, from both Microsoft itself and the community (via CodePlex). Besides that there wasn’t a real integration between ConfigMgr and Orchestrator, yet, but with MDT 2012 Update 1 a really nice new cool feature was introduced. This feature is the Execute Runbook –step during a Task Sequence. It gives anyone, with or without real programming skills, more robust options during a Task Sequence, as long as an IP exist for the action anyone wants to perform. Just remember, lots of these IPs are created by the community. So deliver useful …

Read more