I don't know how I manage to find myself doing things that are "out of the ordinary" so often. Maybe it's just in my nature to want to tweak things so that they're "just right" or provide the exact user experience I'm looking for, rather than settling for less elegant ways of doing them. Maybe it's just my unique combination of A.D.D. and perfectionism that fuels this behavior, but in most cases, it leads me to finding new ways to do things or simply leads me to do things that aren't documented well...

I was trying out the Query Database object to see how I could get some information from Configuration Manager's database, and I decided to use the ODBC connection type, since it seemed like something that would be more usable from an enterprise perspective than putting credentials in the object itself. I went through the typical System DSN creation process using the ODBC Administrator, then added the name of the new DSN to my Query Database object. Next I opened the workflow in the testing console...

I just thought I'd give a shout out to Bruno Saille, one of our Senior Systems Engineers in France, who developed the "Opalis VSD Generator". Since I saw the first version of this tool just over a week ago, Bruno has made a LOT of improvements to it. It's really not fair to call it the "VSD Generator" anymore since it now also exports Word docs. It's really cool and can really save you a lot of time if you're needing to document your workflows. It's really simple to use, with...

System Center Service Manager provides a rich environment for customers to implement their Incident Management processes.  The connectors provided with Service Manager to Operations Manager, Configuration Manager and Active Directory greatly simplify the process getting these processes running.  Opalis with the System Center Service Manager Integration Pack (SCSMIP) is a natural fit for customers looking to use automation to customize and/or automate Incident Management processes. ...

This post has been edited and updated for Orchestrator and can now be found on the Orchestrator blog: Quick Tip: Checking PowerShell Scripting Abilities on a Computer

Opalis 6.3 introduces four new System Center Integration Packs (for SCCM, SCSM, SCVMM, and SCDPM) and updates the existing OpsMgr IP. We'll be posting a number of deep dives into the different Integration Packs to show some of the scenarios we used in creating them, but I thought that for Configuration Manager I would add a "Getting Started" article to walk through all of the different activities and how to quickly build useful workflows with them. What's In the Configuration Manager IP...

This post has been revised for Orchestrator and moved to the Orchestrator blog here: http://blogs.technet.com/b/orchestrator/archive/2012/05/04/oit-quick-tip-using-powershell-switch-parameters-in-cli-activities.aspx