The System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 released today and widely available.  With this release, our team has worked really hard to ensure that we update and support Configuration Manager 2012 Service Pack 1 for our application migration tool called...

In the past few months, we’ve received a lot of requests to help many of you focus on “testing” the new Package Conversion Manager (PCM) that is available in the Microsoft Download Center . It is rather trivial to actually download PCM...

In the complicated and dynamic world of applications, Enterprises continued to find unique and interesting ways to approach software delivery with System Center Configuration Manager. During the development of Package Conversion Manager (PCM), we quickly...

As I’ve outlined in the past, System Center Configuration Manager 2012 and Package Conversion Manager (PCM) are very tightly integrated.  This integration creates a situation whereby any major updates to the ConfigMgr 2012 product requires the PCM...

We recently had a situation with our System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) that literally frustrated the crap out of me.  Don’t take that wrong, the product didn’t really cause the frustration instead it was the mis-use of the libraries...

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...

Earlier this week, I had the privilege of living through a living hell whereby I was wondering what exactly would happen when our development engineering team had to figure out how to rebuild 53+ virtual machines hosted on a Failover Cluster with Clustered...

A key pillar in our rebuilt User-driven installation for MDT 2012 was to remove the monolithic approach and focus on building an extensible, lego-set approach to our UDI Wizard & Designer.  This is an important feature that allows developers...

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...

I’ve arrived.  The wheels are down here in Las Vegas and I’m getting pretty excited.  I’m participating in a few sessions this week and I wanted to talk through some of the things to expect if you attend our MDT 2012 User-Driven Installation...

It’s that time of the year!  The Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) has moved back to its favored home at “The Venetian Hotel” and at the moment is an absolute sold out house.  This conference ranks high upon my list of favorites as it provides...

As you already know, Windows 8 Consumer Preview hit the market just over a week ago.  The 1 million downloads in the first day sheds some light on the demand and I’m sure that many of you are clambering to get it on your devices and find out what...

In Package Conversion Manager (PCM) RC2, we added a feature called Scheduled Package Analyzer (SPA) to assist customers in automating the analysis process for your migrated packages/programs.  This feature gives administrators a lot of flexibility...

Back in November 2011, I announced that our team had reached a critical milestone of releasing the System Center Configuration Manager Package Conversion Manager (PCM) RC1 feature pack.  The engineering team that I oversee spent a great deal of time...

In our group, we have several highly-available sets of clusters that service various needs.  We have one cluster dedicated to running our Team Foundation Services (TFS) and all the System Center management infrastructure to support all clusters. ...

As I’ve started exploring System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2012 , the first task I took as an action item is to learn how to configure active management for our engineering EMC Clariion AX4-5 .  I’ve personally been slacking a bit in getting...

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...

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...

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...

For the past 15 months, our engineering team has spent a great deal of time partnering with the System Center Configuration Manager (ConfigMgr) team building a feature pack called Package Conversion Manager .  As many know, ConfigMgr 2012 introduces...

We recently ran into a problem whereby all of our build definitions started failing, mysteriously. We had a few developers investigating what was occurring and we did see that we were having issues with namespace mismatches. This issue baffled us as we...

We recently had a change take place in our engineering lab that included a large set of layer 3 changes (IP, VLANs , Subnets, etc.) that caused us some downtime.  Although most of the issues are well documented, I found though that there was one...

In today’s post, I want to spend some time sharing how to use the virtualization tools that our team (MPSD Development) built as part of the Configuration Manager Physical-to-Virtual Migration Toolkit (ConfigMgr P2V). In previous posts , I shared...

In the past two posts , I’ve focused on the first two capabilities provided in the Configuration Manager Physical-to-Virtual Migration Toolkit .  The primary scenario for this toolkit is to offer customers the ability to virtualize their physical...

The entire goal of the Configuration Manager Physical-to-Virtual Migration Toolkit is to, as I outlined in my previous post , is to “flip” the physical server with no need for additional hardware.  I outlined in “ Using ConfigMgr Physical-to-Virtual...