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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Local Group Policies for WSUS and the Software Update Agent of ConfigMgr 2012

This blog post will describe a scenario that I ran into this week. Also, to be honest, I wasn’t aware of this exact behavior and, until this moment, I haven’t been able to find any documentation that describes this behavior. Scenario The scenario is that the customer wants to have the ConfigMgr client deployed on their server environment. This server environment is currently patched by using different methods and one of them is WSUS. So far, nothing weird, but the servers patched by WSUS are configured via local group policies. Behavior I think that by now everybody knows that the ConfigMgr client uses the local group policy Specify intranet Microsoft update service location to point to the WSUS server of the ConfigMgr environment, if, of …

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Publish Cumulative Updates of ConfigMgr via System Center Updates Publisher

There are a multiple methods to deploy the Cumulative Updates (CU) of ConfigMgr, to all the different components (console, client and server). The most common used method is the old-school packages that are created during the upgrade of a site server. This blog post will be about another less often, but definitely not less effective, method of deploying a CU is via System Center Updates Publisher (SCUP). In this post I will go through the steps required to deliver a CU, via SCUP, to ConfigMgr as a software update. Prerequisites Before I will go through the steps, it’s important to know that this post does not describe the installation of SCUP itself. In case SCUP is not yet installed, the following posts provide some good …

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New tool: Show memberships of software updates to deployment packages and software update groups

Actually since the first release of ConfigMgr 2012, I’ve seen and got question about software updates. Besides, of course, questions about setting it up, these questions are mainly focused about the memberships of software updates. Simple questions like “In which software update group is this software update?” or “In which deployment packages are the updates of this software update group?” are not that simple to answer. This is all going to change, starting today! I created this simple tool that can perform searches based on a specific software update, a software update group, or a deployment package. Simply specify the Name (in case the of a software update the article id), select the Type (software update, software update group, or deployment package) and click Execute. …

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Add Update Content to a Deployment Package via PowerShell in ConfigMgr 2012

Last week I read a forum question about downloading updates in a software update group. I thought that I could create an easy example, but it wasn’t all as easy as I thought it would. As there is no cmdlet available that performs this specific action, I went back to WMI. In WMI there is a method AddUpdateContent in the SMS_SoftwareUpdatesPackage that should do the trick. After playing around with it for a while I noticed that this method is not as straight-forward as it looks. The method The main problem I had with this method, was the documentation, or better, the lack of documentation. The SDK only contains a very old example that also doesn’t seem to use the right order for the parameters. …

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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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ConfigMgr 2007, Updating a Windows 7 Image with the latest Software Updates – A less conventional, but very effective way

Inspired by a previous post about the option to Schedule Updates for an already existing Operating System Image in ConfigMgr vNext, I created a little batch-file to do something similar without the GUI of ConfigMgr vNext. Of course, I do know that the ‘best practice’ for ConfigMgr 2007 is to just run another Build and Capture Task Sequence, but in some cases this can come in handy. One thing is for sure, this updates a Windows 7 Image within fifteen minutes. Background Story Now lets start with a little background story, to explain why in some situations there might be the need for this batch-file. Every month there are new Software Updates released by Microsoft. During the Software Updates Deployment the, for the organization needed, …

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