Hi Ho – Neil Peterson here, the in-laws have invaded my house, so I am coming to you today from the corner booth at my local coffee shop. I have a quick little treat this morning, nothing to complicated, but pretty cool and important never the less...

Often times when automating a multi-step process, there is a need to build into this automation a certain amount of delay. For instance, if I have rebooted an application server, we not only need to wait for the OS to come back online, but also the application...

Good day all – if you were able to attend MMS2013 hope you had a great time, if not, no worries you are in luck. All MMS2013 sessions should now be available on Channel 9. Check out my session ‘Complex Maintenance Using System Center 2012...

MMS 2013 is right around the corner. While at the conference, I will be delivering one session and appearing as a guest in a second one. In each session I will be demonstrating solutions based on the interaction between System Center 2012 Configuration...

With System Center 2012 Configuration Manager SP1 CU1 deployments starting to roll, I have received a few inquiries into how to determine if CU1 has been appropriately applied. As a cumulative update is not a major update, the version of your Configuration...

As I am working with the 2012 Configuration Manager SP1 (and CU1) PowerShell CMDLETs, the potential for automation around both the management and deployment spaces of Configuration Manager are expanding. That said, I have run against a few automation...

Whoo - long time no blog. I am still around and kicking, just been occupied with a new baby ( New-CMFreak ), a new home, and wrapping up presentations for MMS. My hope is to kick this blog back into gear over the next month. Stay tuned for what I hope...

While recently working on a Runbook solution for patching Windows Failover Clusters, I ran into the need of detecting if the Software Update installation process had placed the target system into a reboot pending state. After doing some research, I found...

I have long been a crusty old VBScript kind of guy, that just the way it is. I’ve been knocking out ‘short’ 300 line scripts for 10 plus years. In that time I have also gone through a few epic multi thousand line monstrosity scripts...

Well I thought I was Mr. Smarty Pants and had the whole ‘running 2012 Configuration Manager cmdlets from an Orchestrator Run .Net Script activity’ figured out ( as documented in this post ). As it turns out, there is bit more to the story...

Here we are, week two of the New Year, and the goodies just keep coming. In case you missed it the Configuration Manager 2012 SP1 Toolkit has been released and with it brings a whole batch of goodness. Some of the tools included are the usual suspects...

Good day all – Quick blog here. With the recent release of 2012 Configuration Manager SP1 and the new Configuration Manager PowerShell cmdlets, the stage has been set for over the top Configuration Manager automation. This week I jumped on my first...

Welcome to 2013 – It’s a new year and an exciting time here at neilp central. I have several larger Configuration Manager and Orchestrator projects that I will be tackling this year; all of which will be detailed in this blog. In addition...

Welcome back to ‘the blog’ and this series on Software Metering and automating the removal of unused software with 2012 Configuration Manager (and Orchestrator). If you have been keeping score, this is the third installment in this series...

In the first portion of this multi-blog look at software metering, I discussed how to create a software metering rule, observe on the client both the storage and processing of said rule, and finally discussed the server side summarization and how to manually...

Since the beginning of my involvement with Configuration Manager and SMS I have always considered and communicated with others the notion that software metering data can be used as a trigger mechanism for the removal of unused software. In other words...

Welcome to the Deployment and Administration Guide for Runbook Commander 2.0. The intent of this blog post is to walk you through the installation, deployment, and some technical back end information pertaining to Runbook Commander 2.0. If you are not...

Many months ago I made available Runbook Commander: An Orchestrator Console Extension for Configuration Manager. I am pleased to announce that today version 2.0 has been posted to the TechNet Gallery for download . I have added many features (some significant...

With the introduction of System Center 2012 Configuration Manager SP1 Beta, we have been given access to a beta client for some distributions of the Unix/Linux Operating System. This is great news and will allow for many (but not all) Configuration Manager...

Introduction - During my last blog post I detailed some of the internal components of the System Center 2012 Application Request and Approval system. Included was a look into the views created in the CM Database, WMI specific data and methods, and...

Introduction - Approaching my ten-year of systems management using SMS / Configuration Manager I can reflect back on many scripts, applications, and in some circumstances full systems I’ve implemented in order to facilitate a ‘self-service...

Introduction - Welcome to the last in this series of four articles examining cross forest support in 2012 Configuration Manager. In the previous three postings I have examined configuration options for client management across a non-trusted forest...

Introduction - Up until this point each scenario in this series of articles has detailed the management of ‘well connected’ clients. In other words changes have been introduced into existing infrastructure in order to facilitate untrusted...

Intro - In the previous ‘simple’ example the assumption was that a very small group of known clients would be managed. Because of this, relying on basic ‘manual’ client installation and location lookup mechanisms (manually specified...

Cross Forest support in Configuration Manager is a topic often discussed, can be confusing, and has changed considerably with the introduction of 2012 Configuration Manager. While each environment may have its own needs based on environmental configuration...