CCMEXEC.COM – System Center blog

I have great honor to be doing two sessions at the SCCM Summit 2012 in Stockholm, Sweden 17-18/1 – 2012. http://www.cornerstone.se/sv/Event/sccm2012/

SCCM Summit 2012 will be 1 1/2 day focusing on all the great new features in System Center 2012 Configuration Manager(in Swedish).

The sessions I will deliver is:

• Application Management in two parts(double session), where we will cover the whole life-cycle of application management in CM 2012.
• System Center 2012 Endpoint Protection, how to protect your clients using endpoint protection in Cm 2012.

There are are some great speakers which will be part of the event:

Anders Ahl – Microsoft

Johan Arwidmark – Knowledge Factory

Niall Brady- Enfo Zipper

Peter Frodin – Atea

I hope to see you there!

A new version of the FEP Definition Update Automation Tool is released. It contains a great new feature, that the Software Update Package containing the FEP definitions isn’t updated if there are no new Definition Updates.
With the old version the DP’s were always updated, so this will save replication traffic to remote locations.

Great Update!

Some more fixes:

• Removal of /RefreshDP switch, add new switch: /DisableRefreshDP
• Improved logic to skip updating the deployment package if no content change was detected
• Corrected the default update filter string so it will not retrieve superseded updates and enables functionality when custom updates published by System Center Update Publisher are present

Check out the complete article here: http://blogs.technet.com/b/configmgrteam/archive/2011/11/01/how-to-use-definition-update-automation-tool-for-forefront-endpoint-protection-2010-update-rollup-1.aspx

/Jörgen

The release candidate is now available!
Release candidate = new product name, it is now “System Center 2012 Configuration Manager“! There are a lot of new features in the Release candidate so be sure to check it out!
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=27841

Some of the new features:

“In the Release Candidate, we’ve introduced some additional and enhanced capabilities, including:

• Improved endpoint protection functionality, with integrated setup, management and reporting for System Center 2012 Endpoint Protection.
• Improved application catalog design that provides a better, more responsive experience when requesting and downloading applications.
• New support for Windows Embedded devices, including Windows Embedded 7 SP1, POSReady 7, Windows 7 Thin PC, and Windows Embedded Compact 7.
• Improved client status checks for Configuration Manager services and features.
• Improved compliance enforcement and tracking, with the ability to create dynamic collections of baseline compliance and the generation of hourly compliance summaries.
• Platform support for deep mobile device management of Nokia Symbian Belle devices. Pending a platform update by Nokia later this calendar year for these devices, customers will be able to try out the management of these Nokia devices with ConfigMgr.
• Additional scalability and performance improvements.

Read the whole article here:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/server-cloud/archive/2011/10/25/system-center-2012-configuration-manager-release-candidate-is-here.aspx

Another great article was released yesterday about how Microsoft IT uses Configuration Manager 2012: Configuration Manager 2012 Real World Deployment Experience

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shitanshu/archive/2011/10/16/configuration-manager-2012-deployment-real-world-experience-part-1.aspx

I hope you enjoy the release candidate as much as I do!

/Jörgen

On the 25-26 of October the Best-of-MMS 2011 event took place in Stockholm Sweden. I had the great honour of doing a 5 minute demo on Configuration Manager 2012 in the keynote. It was great fun!

I also delivered two sessions:

“Microsoft Bitlocker Administration and Monitoring Tool”

“Configuration Manager 2012 + Forefront Endpoint protection 2012 – Better together”

There where many great sessions on System Center 2012, making you really wanna start using all product right away, can hardly wait.

Thank you Microsoft for a great event!

Haven’t upgraded to Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010 Update Rollup 1 yet?

Here is one reason which me and my customers really appreciate and that is the amount of information included in the E-mail alert sent when a malware is detected. More information have been added to the mail  in Update Rollup 1 compared to RTM.
Thank you for that excellent improvement Microsoft!

E-Mail alert using RTM:

E-Mail after Update Rollup 1:

It displays where the file i located as well as action taken as displayed below.

So if you haven’t upgraded yet i strongly advise you to, more information about all the other improvement is available here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2551095

I have done a couple of upgrades to FEP update rollup 1 and it works great, using the instructions at Technet Library. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh211538.aspx

What I found however is that the shortcut on the Start Menu is duplicated as the shortcut included in the RTM FEP client is called “Microsoft Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010″ and the shortcut included in the FEP Update 1 client is called “Microsoft Forefront Endpoint Protection”, the same goes for the information in Add/Remove programs.

When upgrading a client the “old” shortcut is not removed.

I did a really simple vbscript which will delete the old shortcut on Windows 2008/Vista/2008 R2/Windows7, haven’t tested it on XP.

set objShell = createobject("Wscript.Shell")
Specialfolder = objshell.SpecialFolders("AllUsersStartMenu")

Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
If objFSO.FileExists(Specialfolder & "\Programs\Microsoft Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010.lnk") Then
objFSO.DeleteFile(Specialfolder & "\Programs\Microsoft Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010.lnk")
End If

Advertising it to all clients with the “updated FEP client” will remove the “old” shortcut, example of the Collection query which includes all computers with the FEP Update Rollup 1 client:

select SMS_R_SYSTEM.ResourceID,SMS_R_SYSTEM.ResourceType,SMS_R_SYSTEM.Name,SMS_R_SYSTEM.SMSUniqueIdentifier,SMS_R_SYSTEM.ResourceDomainORWorkgroup,SMS_R_SYSTEM.Client from SMS_R_System inner join SMS_G_System_ADD_REMOVE_PROGRAMS on SMS_G_System_ADD_REMOVE_PROGRAMS.ResourceId = SMS_R_System.ResourceId inner join SMS_G_System_ADD_REMOVE_PROGRAMS_64 on SMS_G_System_ADD_REMOVE_PROGRAMS_64.ResourceId = SMS_R_System.ResourceId where SMS_G_System_ADD_REMOVE_PROGRAMS.DisplayName = "Microsoft Forefront Endpoint Protection" or SMS_G_System_ADD_REMOVE_PROGRAMS_64.DisplayName = "Microsoft Forefront Endpoint Protection

I hope this can be useful.

/Jörgen

I got this fantastic mail!!

“Dear Jorgen Nilsson,

Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2011 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in System Center Configuration Manager technical communities during the past year.”

Thank you Microsoft for the great honour! And thank you all how have pushed me to do more and be better every day!
Thank you all!

/Jörgen

When Windows 8 Technical Preview was made available I just had to test it together with SCCM 2012 beta 2 and it works! Nice with some new toys.Here are some screenshots

Software Distribution

Inventory

Remote Control

Kent bet me to it, he posted this yesterday: http://blog.coretech.dk/kea/todays-big-question-can-you-deploy-the-configmgr-2012-beta-2-client-to-windows-8/

Niall already tested OS deployment with Windows 8, Excellent! http://www.windows-noob.com/forums/index.php?/topic/4215-using-sccm-2012-beta-2-in-a-lab-part-12-test-deploying-windows-8-developer-preview/

/Jörgen