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Our engineering team has had an amazing journey this past year with two key releases to help our customers improve their capabilities for deploying Windows in their enterprises.   As you know, we released Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2012 in April of this year to coincide with the Microsoft...

After spending a lot of time talking to customers after we integrated code-name “Modena” into the powerful, and enterprise-ready Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010 , it was obvious that our engineering team needed to spend some dedicated effort in helping customers get the right training for implementing...

In today’s post, I wanted to take some time to outline to ConfigMgr administrators how to effectively use a key feature that is in Package Conversion Manager (PCM) RC released last week .  Beyond the US – English release , we also released the international versions of PCM – German | Simplified...

Since the release of MDT 2010 Update 1 , our User-Driven Installation (UDI) engineering team has worked extremely hard at making the use of UDI much simpler for administrators and end-users to use.  This is the founding principle, or pillar, we focused on this past year.  This hard work of...

In today’s post, I wanted to take a little bit of time to build a bit deeper on the underlying principles of the “Readiness” state for Package Conversion Manager (PCM) as it is the fundamental to understand.  My colleague, Cameron King, outlined in his blog titled “ Package Conversion Manager Readiness...

  As I’ve previously discussed on my blog , our engineering team has partnered with two System Center teams – Configuration Manager & Virtual Machine Manager – to deliver a new toolkit called Configuration Manager Physical-to-Virtual (P2V) Migration Toolkit .  This toolkit aims at simplifying...

During a ask-the-experts at Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) 2011 in Las Vegas, a customer asked a question of how to utilize Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2010 Update 1 to install Windows Server 2008/R2 and enable the Hyper-V role .  The customer had tried several things but to no avail as...

During the past year, we’ve been working on building a new P2V toolkit that was recently released.  This toolkit, Configuration Manager P2V Migration Toolkit, aims at accelerating the migration to Configuration Manager 2012.  It is, though, much more than just a P2V toolkit and over the new...

I’ve landed.  My bags didn’t arrive so the first evening in Vegas was one of no relaxing.  I now can officially relax and get excited as we prepare for this great week.  As many of you already know, Microsoft is preparing for this week’s Management Summit 2011 in Las Vegas . This is a...

The IT Showcase team at Microsoft who aims at sharing how Microsoft uses their own technology to deliver IT to 280,000 clients world-wide.  Our team built the technology that previously wasn’t available as part of Configuration Manager 2007 , and luckily, that technology was recently integrated...

For those who joined myself and Brian Copps at our TechEd 2010 presentation, you learned in-depth how we run one of the largest set of Corporate online services such as www.microsoft.com , update.microsoft.com , and technet/msdn.microsoft.com using the System Center suite.  We provided you the overview...

As many of you already know, Microsoft is preparing for next week’s Management Summit 2010 in Las Vegas . This is a great event, not only for his content but also its incredible knowledge transfer capabilities. As a team member in the greater Management & Services Division (MSD) at Microsoft I can...

I promised early on to not use “marketing” as a ploy in my blog and trust me this is painful to write.  However, if it wasn’t for the fact that many of the blog posts here are directly related, I decided to go ahead with a little bit of selfish plugging.  In a story format, I recently wrote...

In order to go from nothing to a finished, completed installation of a System Center Configuration Manager (ConfigMgr) client services role such as a Distribution Point (DP) requires that an administrator configures the future DP server automatically.  This includes a few key details that, often...

In today’s post, I will focus on how I worked with our System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) team to build the actual infrastructure and setup alerting for our infrastructure to ensure that if our Configuration Manager Distribution Points (DPs) are getting a high number of connections, we will spin...

In today’s post, I will focus on pulling the final piece together of this 4-part series titled “ConfigMgr 2007 Distribution Points Load Testing.” Why is this topic even important? This, i hope, is rather obvious but in case it isn’t let me share why it was important for us at Microsoft and why you as...

The last variable in the load testing scenario is the actual creation of your stress tests using a Web tester. DP downloads from clients can be initiated via Server Message Block (SMB) or HTTP but the default is to use HTTP in ConfigMgr 2007. The next variable to understand is the use of HTTP versus...

As mentioned yesterday, CertPicker assembly or console requires that certificates already be present for your environment and in a folder in .pfx format. Without these certificates, one wouldn’t get very far using CertPicker so Part II of this multi-series posts will cover how to successfully create...

At Microsoft, we have 280,000+ client machines that are managed worldwide and in our past life we were planning to scale our service to other companies client machines as well. As part of the platform team responsible for ensuring that our ConfigMgr 2007 infrastructure could scale to support hundreds...

Getting Started At Microsoft IT, we are beginning the process of running our ConfigMgr infrastructure on Hyper-V (virtualized) and we are starting to invest some energy in architecting our future data center in a way to ensure we are cost effective yet performance conscious. In this blog post, I wanted...