Configuring Collection Membership Evaluation in ConfigMgr 2012

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The title for this small post sounds like a huge configuration, but it’s not. It’s just one setting. In this post I will show how to change it and, maybe more important, what it does. In ConfigMgr 2012 every collection has a checkbox Use incremental updates for this collection. This option is to periodically scan for only new or changed resources from the previous collection evaluation and update the collection membership with only these resources. This is what in ConfigMgr 2007 R3 was called Dynamically add new resources. The biggest difference is that now the interval can be configured. Configure To configure the interval navigate to Administration > Overview > Site Configuration > Sites. Now select the Site and click Settings > Configure Site Components …

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Reporting about all the different OS Deployment Versions with ConfigMgr 2012

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One of the biggest challenges with OS Deployment is keeping track of all the different deployments and everything that changed between the deployments. This post will focus on the first part, keeping track of all the different deployments. I will do that by showing a way to write information to the registry, creating a hardware inventory for those registry keys and building a report on the inventory data. For the second part, keeping track of all the changes, take a look at this great post of Maik Koster. Create registry keys The first thing is to create a script that will write information about the deployment to the registry. As a deployment is much more then just the image, we need information about the task …

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Migrating to Windows 8 by using hard-links with ConfigMgr 2012

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After the release of Windows 8 last week we can already start thinking about migrating. When I’m thinking about migrations I always like the computer-refresh scenario’s where we can use hard-links. In this post I will show a basic task sequence to capture user files and settings, either offline or online, with help of hard-links. I already showed the basics of that in an earlier post last year when ConfigMgr 2012 was still in Beta. Since then the Wizard screens have not changed so I will not show that again, but  I will show some more information about what happens. Prerequisites To support migrating to Windows 8 we need ConfigMgr 2012 SP1 (which is currently still CTP) in place with at least the following packages: …

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Add HTA-Support to a Boot Image with ConfigMgr 2012

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With ConfigMgr 2012 lot’s of things got simplified. One of those things is adding extra components to the Boot Images. Before it was possible to add these extra components by either using the MDT integration, or manually running DISM. Now it’s possible to do this from the console! Of course, in the background it’s still DISM that does the action. In this post I will show an example of how to add HTA-Support to a Boot Image with ConfigMgr 2012. Of course the same steps apply to adding any of the optional components to a Boot Image. In the ConfigMgr Console browse to Software Library > Overview > Operating System > Boot Images, right-click a Boot Image and click Properties. In the Properties, select the …

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Deploy App-V version of Office 2013 with ConfigMgr 2012

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One of the new features coming with the Service Pack 1 release of ConfigMgr 2012 is the support for App-V 5. So what is a better way to try this feature then deploying the just released Microsoft Office 2013 Preview AppV packages in combination with the just released App-V 5.0 Beta 2 Desktop Client. But then the big question is, how can we deploy this? Well, I thought it was pretty straight forward, but there where a few caveats that everyone should know and pay attention to. Challenge 1: App-V Package Name The first thing I ran into was that I couldn’t import the Microsoft Office 2013 Preview App-V package in ConfigMgr. It appeared that the default configured Package Name was to long for a …

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Deploying Windows Server 2012 including Roles and Features with ConfigMgr 2012

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This week, for me, was all about deploying Windows Server 2012 (which is currently still in RC), with ConfigMgr 2012 SP1 (which is currently still in CTP) and MDT 2012 Update 1 (which is currently still in BETA). So it was one big test case, but it showed a lot of possibilities for the coming releases. For those who follow me on twitter this post will contain a lot more information about the short tweets that I already did the last week. For instance, the need for running your own Build-and-Capture Task Sequence got a lot smaller with Windows Server 2012 (and Windows 8), because the default install.wim will install on the C-drive ánd ConfigMgr 2012 brings Offline Servicing. So when you’re used to deploy …

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How to silent install the ConfigMgr 2012 Admin Console

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As we all know, a lot of things are made a lot easier with ConfigMgr 2012. One of these things is installing the ConfigMgr 2012 Admin Console. We don’t need to make ini-files anymore and we don’t need the complete installation source anymore. Instead ConfigMgr 2012 delivers a separate installer for installing the console only. In this post I will shortly explain, in two steps, how easy this can be done. Step 1. Locate the installation files The first thing we need to do, is to locate the installation files. When we are looking around, we will see that there are two different locations were the installation files can be found: <ConfigMgrSiteServerInstallPath>\tools\ConsoleSetup <ConfigMgrInstallMedia>\SMSSETUP\BIN\I386 Of these two locations the first one is the best option (and …

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How to use Task Sequence Variables in a running Task Sequence by script in ConfigMgr 2007

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Using Task Sequence variables in a running Task Sequence by script is actually really straight forward. Also for most of you this might be common knowledge, but I noticed this week that it doesn’t count for everyone, yet. So in this post I will show the two (only two!) steps it takes to get or set variables with your script. The first step is to create an instance of Microsoft.SMS.TSEnvironment. As this is a COM automation object, you could use every language that can use those. I will use VBScript in this example. Creating the object can be done by the following line of code: set env = CreateObject(“Microsoft.SMS.TSEnvironment”) Now that we’ve got our object the second step is to get, or set Task Sequence …

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All ConfigMgr 2012 related releases combined

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What a week it was! As we all expected the last week was one full of cool announcements and releases. In this post I will give an overview of all the ConfigMgr 2012 related releases of last week. System Center 2012 empowers you with a common management toolset for your private and public cloud applications and services. System Center helps you confidently deliver IT as a Service for your business. System Center 2012 is available in English. Download System Center 2012: http://bit.ly/Jzfak9 System Center 2012 Configuration Manager Component Add-ons and Extensions Package Conversion Manager (PCM). The Microsoft System Center 2012 Configuration Manager Package Conversion Manager allows for converting packages and programs into applications and deployment types in System Center Configuration Manager 2012. There is a …

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Some basic USMT 4.0 actions explained

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The last few weeks a saw and got a lot of questions about capturing specific files and folders with USMT. These actions are actually quite basic and good documented on Technet, but still seem to raise a lot of questions. So I decided to devote a post to this. I will show some examples and will try to explain what it all means. Let’s start with a component that migrates all files in a specific folder. <component type=”Documents” context=”System”>  <displayName>Component to migrate all files in a specific folder including subfolders</displayName>     <role role=”Data”>        <rules>           <include>              <objectSet>                 <pattern type=”File”>C:\SpecificFolder\* [*]</pattern>              </objectSet>           </include>        </rules>    </role> </component> Well, that’s a nice component but what does it all mean? Let’s go …

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