Applications

An overview of my posts about ConfigMgr 2012 SP1

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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 …

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Preventing user-targeted applications and policies on specific systems with ConfigMgr 2012

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This week I want to devote a small post to something very nice and, in some situations, very easy. Think about a situation where, in general, applications are user-targeted and only a few exceptions are system-targeted. Usually these targeted systems are then used specifically for that application. So these systems shouldn’t get all the applications (and settings) of every user that logs on, as it might screw-up the specific application. The nice thing is that ConfigMgr 2012, and especially SP1, has a solution for this! The solution is the new setting Enable user policy on clients. Configuration Now lets start with the configuration, which is actually very easy. Like always it’s all about knowing that the possibility exists. This is another new Client Setting in …

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

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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 …

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

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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 …

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Deploying Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 8 with ConfigMgr 2012

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This week I want to devote a post to deploying the Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) for Windows 8 using ConfigMgr 2012. Even though the installer is only available as a Windows Update Standalone Installer, in my opinion it should be deployed using the application model in ConfigMgr 2012. This gives me the possibility to show some basics about the manual applications in ConfigMgr 2012 and more specifically, about the Detection Rules and the Requirements. In a step-by-step way I will go through the wizards of creating and deploying an application. During this I will give some extra explanation with the step about the Detection Rule, as it has to be manually created and there are many options for that. RSAT for Windows 8 can …

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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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Application Relationships in ConfigMgr 2012 (B2)

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As we all know now for a while already, ConfigMgr 2012 (B2) has a new Application Model. The old fashion Packages are still possible, but there is nothing changed and no features added. They are just there to make a migration easier… Instead we’ve got Applications now, which make it easier to detect installed products, to create dependencies, to supersede, etc.. This post I want shine a light on the different relationships of an Application. ConfigMgr 2012 (B2) knows three different types of relationships for an Application: Dependencies Supersedence Global Conditions Dependencies Let’s start with the first relationship, dependencies. Dependencies make it easy to specify the software prerequisites of an Application. The cool thing is that this can be multiple things and it can even …

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