It is still vacation time in Sweden but nothing can pull you from the hammock like a Technical Preview of Configuration Manager! in this case 1807. Some great additions in this one, like a long awaited repair option which will enable us to basically do what we did back in SCCM 2007 where many of us used a repair program that we made available to the user so they could repair their applications themselves without calling Servicedesk( and easier for a technician).
Application improvements
We can as I wrote add a repair option to an application and then let the end user be able to repair it themselves in Software Center(not yet available) The best thing about the repair option is that we can specify our own repair script and not just passing /fa to msiexec.exe for instance which in my experience seldom solves problems.
We can per deployment then decide if the end-user is allowed to run repair or not, which also can be very useful, restrict it for complex and sensitive apps but allow it for the rest.
And in the screenshot above we can also see another great addition, the possibility to send an e-mail with an approval request and the receiver of that mail can approve/deny it directly in the mail. As this is configured per deployment we can have multiple recipients per applications. The request link is only valid once so if the mail goes to a group and Stefan approves it, another admin that receives the mail cannot deny it.
It requires the Cloud Management gateway to handle the approval directly from the mail so if you don’t have the Cloud Management gateway in your environment yet it is a component of the future with more and more features using it. It also requires one of my favorite features that has been in TP since 1612 which is the Restful Odata endpoint OData endpoint data access. Let’s hope that this means that we are getting closer to getting the restful Odata enpoint in CB as well.
Select drive used for temporary data storage during Offline servicing.
We can also select which drive is used when using Offline Servicing which is a small but asked for improvement as well.
Configuration Manager Community Hub
From within the console we have brand new Workspace called Community. From there we can reach the documentation and provide feedback, but most important is the Hub. In the hub we in the community can all share Configuration Manager scripts, reports, configuration items and more coming. In this TP there is currently only on script but be sure to check it out, provide feedback on how you would like to be notified in new versions, new content, changes which is some of the things that comes to my mind. This will be great!!
More features like script output is now improved and can handle more outputs than before, improvements to third-party catalogs and more. Read the documentation for the full list. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sccm/core/get-started/capabilities-in-technical-preview-1807