Month: May 2014

Unexpected results: Use role based administration to provide different access to specific applications in ConfigMgr 2012

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This time I want to address a specific scenario around role based administration. This scenario will be focused on providing different levels of access, for a user, on different applications. I’ve seen this question on different forums over the last year(s) and also had this same question with a customer recently. Scenario This scenario is about a enterprise customer that uses ConfigMgr for managing their laptops. Nothing special, so far, not even the fact that they have around 100k laptops spread over the globe. What makes this customer special is the fact that they have a global IT department and a local IT department per country. The global IT department is responsible for making the generic applications available and the local IT department is responsible …

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Quickly get an overview of the client agent times in ConfigMgr 2012

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This time it will be a really short blog post, about showing the client agents and their times. Normally, to see the times of the different client agents it’s necessary to look at the properties of a device, but that’s really time consuming for multiple devices. Also, these agents and their times are shown in two different rows as two different arrays. The only one that can be shown in the console is the Heartbeat Discovery. This should be possible in an easier way and also providing a better overview. Script Actually, this is pretty easy to do in PowerShell. The following PowerShell function gets a list of all devices within ConfigMgr, After that it will loop through all the devices and per device loop …

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How to install clients on Linux computers, when the Site Roles require HTTPS communication in ConfigMgr 2012

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About four years ago I did a post about installing the ConfigMgr client on a WORKGROUP computer, when the ConfigMgr Site is in Native Mode. On the certificate side of it, this post will have a lot of similarities with that post. Installing a ConfigMgr client on a Linux computer is a nice challenge, when the ConfigMgr site is configured to require HTTPS. I think I am not the only one working with ConfigMgr and only uses a little tiny bit of Linux. So to make this process for everyone a bit easier I wrote down these four steps for implementing the correct certificates and installing the ConfigMgr client on a Linux computer. Of course these same certificate configuration steps can also be used for …

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Change device ownership – The journey through log files, WMI and PowerShell of ConfigMgr 2012

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Last week I’ve got the question about how to quickly change the device owner of all mobile devices. This question was based on the fact that by default the device owner is set to Personal and that default value cannot be changed. The Configuration Manager console answer is easy, select the devices, right-click and select Change Ownership.  But now the real question(s), how does this work and is this scriptable? This blog post will contain my small journey through the SMSProv.log, WMI, PowerShell and TechNet for an answer. PowerShell part I – Change Ownership After a quick browse through the cmdlet referent on TechNet, I noticed that this should be very easy to achieve via PowerShell. There is a cmdlet available Set-CMDeviceOwnership that does exactly …

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