Use Group Policy to enable Office 365 clients to receive updates via ConfigMgr

This week something completely different, compared to the last couple of weeks. This week I want to take a quick look at enabling Office 365 clients to receive updates via ConfigMgr. More specifically, use Group Policy for configuring Office 365 clients to receive updates via ConfigMgr. There is a lot of information available about configuring the Office 365 clients via the initial installation and configuration (configuration.xml), but what about the existing Office 365 clients? In this post I will provide the required information about using Group Policy to enable the existing Office 365 clients to receive update via ConfigMgr. I will show the Group Policy settings, related to updating the Office 365 clients, and I’ll show how those settings relate to the initial installation and …

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

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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Remember this?: Software Distribution is currently paused on this computer with ConfigMgr 2007

This is more of a remember this for my self then probably in general, as this is a problem that we don’t run into that much. Only for me it was the second time already, but I couldn’t directly remember anymore what the problem was. So this post will be more of a reminder for the eventually next time… Also this will be a short post as it will just describe the problem we ran into with my current customer and what the solution was. The problem we ran into was that after we deployed a new machine we could advertise software to it, but the installation would never start. Looking into the execmgr.log we could see the following message: “This program cannot run because …

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Remember this?: Re-run Advertisement for one (or more) specific client(s) with ConfigMgr 2007

I’m not sure if this is going to be a ‘remember this’ –series, but at least in this case it fits really good. We all know it, but sometimes we need a refreshment. We all know those scenario’s where we send an Advertisement to a Collection of clients and for some reason we may want to rerun the Advertisement for only one (or more) specific client(s). In this case we can use the general rerun options of an Advertisement (like always rerun), but they will affect all clients in the collection and won’t work for user-targeted Advertisements. So what’s left in this case? Well the option I like the most is that there is a registry change that we can make to trick the Advertisement …

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ConfigMgr 2007 and creating a non-recurring Maintenance Window by script

At my current customer they’re not using the Software Updates of ConfigMgr 2007 (yet), but there was a wish for a more controlled company-wide deployment without having to change all the current advertisements (and the whole deployment system). So the idea came to create (and delete) maintenance windows by script (when needed). Luckily the ConfigMgr 2007 SDK has some pretty straight forward examples of creating and deleting maintenance windows (see also the links at the end of this post). Deleting a maintenance window was almost just copy-paste from the SDK, the tricky part was creating a maintenance window and then especially the non-recurring schedule. At the end, this is (the short version of) what we ended up with: ‘==================================================== ‘ MAIN – Set connection, schedule …

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Using USMT 4.0 and ConfigMgr 2007 while migrating from local profiles to partially redirected profiles

This time I want to devote a post to a situation I haven’t been in that often. The customer was migrating from Windows XP to Windows 7, well.. nothing special here, but also migrating from local profiles to (partially) redirected profiles, well.. that’s a challenge. So to capture the userdata AND -settings we had to come up with something special. Of course we could do some things with scripting, but the biggest challenge was the fact that the new (partially redirected) profile location was only available after the first logon to Windows 7. With this information I started thinking about USMT 4.0 again. Most often you use this to migrate on a computer basis, but we made an exception on this. We came up with …

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Auto Deployment of FEP Definition Updates with ConfigMgr 2007

This week Microsoft released Forefront Endpoint Protection (FEP) 2010 Update Rollup 1 (including some extra tools). The tools update included some extra policies and also a Definition Update Automation Tool. Together with this, there was also an article published about Definition Update Automation with Configuration Manager. Personally I don’t like the idea of creating a new Task with the Windows Task Scheduler, while we’ve got Status Filter Rules within ConfigMgr. With these rules we can make a “connection” between the scheduled synchronization of the Software Update Point (SUP) and the start of the Definition Update Automation Tool. Otherwise the tool might run while there hasn’t been a new synchronization of the SUP. To prevent this, I will show in this post how to create the …

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The best informational links about FEP 2010 (and its integration with ConfigMgr 2007)

This time I want to devote a post to some of the best informational links about Forefront Endpoint Protection (FEP) 2010 (and its integration with ConfigMgr 2007). These links can make it a lot easier to plan, scale, install, manage and troubleshoot your ConfigMgr 2007 with FEP 2010 integrated -environment. FEP 2010 General Information  – This link provides some general information about FEP 2010. Link: http://www.microsoft.com/fep/ FEP 2010 Deployment Case Study @Microsoft – This link provides some information about the case study used by Microsoft IT for FEP 2010. Link: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg543127.aspx FEP 2010 TechNet Library – This link provides all the information available in the Microsoft TechNet Library about FEP 2010. It includes planning, scaling, installing and managing a FEP 2010 –environment, with or without …

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Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2012 Beta is available!

For those who didn’t read it on Twitter, Facebook or mail yet, MDT 2012 B1 is available for download! Some of the best things that are mentioned in the release notes, are that it supports ConfigMgr 2012 B2 and also still supports ConfigMgr 2007 SP2! Besides that it also supports the deployment of ALL operating systems from Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 until now. So it only delivers extra’s! For more information, read here the mail of Microsoft Connect: Thanks for your ongoing interest and participation in the MDT beta review program. We hope you’ll take the time to preview and provide feedback on MDT 2012 Beta 1. Download the beta materials on Connect: https://connect.microsoft.com/site14/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=8689 Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2012 Beta 1 rides the …

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Asset Intelligence Reports are not showing correct data since the upgrade to ConfigMgr 2007 SP2

This blog post is going to be a short explanation about why the Asset Intelligence (AI) Reports are not showing the correct data after an upgrade to ConfigMgr 2007 SP2. The cause of not showing data was actually more logic then I first thought. One of the items on the checklist for an upgrade (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee344152.aspx) is the following: If you have customized the default SMS_def.mof hardware inventory reporting file, you must create a backup of this file before upgrading the site. When upgrading a site, customizations made to the existing SMS_def.mof file will be overwritten. Maybe this still doesn’t make sense, but it will after the following piece of history about enabling AI in ConfigMgr 2007. In the ConfigMgr 2007 RTM version AI had to …

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