Balancing server patching with maintaining the availability of the services that run on these servers can be a difficult task for an IT Pro, with lots of repetitive, time-consuming, and error-prone steps. Luckily, Orchestrator has emerged as an effective...

One of our most awesome test guys on the Orchestrator Team, Zhenhua Yao, who has delivered such goodies as the TFS IP and a PowerShell IP on our CodePlex site , has done it again! Anyone who has built an IP using the Orchestrator SDK knows that you need...

I saw this today in an email from PowerShell.com and had to pass it on… seems like PSv3 is going to have lots of little handy additions: Implicit Foreach in PSv3 PowerShell v3 Beta is available for quite some time now, so every now and then we start tossing...

Ok, I spared you the “SQL Sequel” puns this time, but this article does contain some SQL…In this article, I’m again going to talk about actually removing data, so here goes the big scary warning box: Note from the legal department: The process described...

When I first started working with Opalis (now Orchestrator) and the SDK, I was taught that you could create activities (and Integration Packs) using the declarative approach or the imperative approach. The way it was relayed, these were two mutually-exclusive...

Even on the product team, there is a lot of information we don’t see that gets published about the product. Other arms of Microsoft like Customer Support are continually listening to customers and feed bugs and change requests to the product team, but...

Whoa!  What’s with the new style?!  The System Center engineering team blogs are now part of the Server & Tools blog network which is a select few top tier blogs from the Server and Tools division.  This network is part of a larger...

I just saw this come through my email and I had to share it, and I admit I’m a little jealous and a little relieved at the same time. You see I have had the idea of writing an extension to Configuration Manager to launch Orchestrator runbooks via the...

Here’s a new Knowledge Base article we published. This one talks about an issue where running the Orchestrator "SCOExpressWriter.exe /register" command fails with "Failed to create and register Orchestrator Express Writer" and logs...

Greetings, Hi, Carmen Summers here from the Cloud and Data Center Management System Center team.  Yesterday System Center released Update Rollup 2 for System Center 2012 posted on all System Center Blogs.  This is the second Update Rollup System...

This is a guest post from Premier Field Engineer Neil.  Thanks for sharing Neil!   Configuration Manager Status Messages are not a new concept, nor is the ability to trigger specific actions based on the generation of a pre-identified status...

Here’s a new Knowledge Base article we published. This one talks about an issue where the Orchestrator Run Program activity returns a "Process creation failed" "The system cannot find the file specified" error. ===== Symptoms Executing...

I was browsing through all of the great new articles over on our TechNet Wiki and came across this one that I thought you might like. It’s written by Microsoft’s own Anil Erduran and it discusses the concept of RunBooks in Orchestrator 2012.  It...

One of the most foundational activities an Orchestrator admin does is installing Integration Packs. After all, Integration Packs provide the real value to Orchestrator because they allow you to extend its capabilities and let you connect to virtually...

I do lots of PowerShell scripting, both inside runbooks and in stand-alone scripts. I have my own little virtual lab with a bunch of VMs and a domain controller that has a group policy assigned to enable the right PowerShell scripting settings on all...

  Did you get this error message when trying to import the Cloud Service MP runbooks into Orchestrator?   This is because the Cloud Service MP is not actually testing to see if the user that is running the setup actually has the required permissions...

I saw a question in the forums around multi-value data and how someone could pass multi-value data in to a runbook via the Initialize Data activity. I was going to answer the question there but thought it would be better to post an article to reach a...

One of the cool things about Orchestrator is that it can automatically handle multiple-instance threading of runbooks or queue them up depending on your need. For instance, you may have a runbook that processes new users to be added to Active Directory...

After slogging through configuring the SCSM web interfaces for load balancing I thought I would try to get it going with Orchestrator.  It was fortunately much easier this time since I knew what to look for and experiment with.  You should probably...

One of the common parameter types in PowerShell is the switch parameter. It’s basically a Boolean (true/false) type of parameter, and you either add it to the command line or not. Here’s an example: get-scoevents get-scoevents –formatXML The above command...

One of our favorite community members, Ryan Andorfer, has updated his community IP for Configuration Manager 2007 to work with Orchestrator, and I thought I’d highlight this IP for everyone. You may know Ryan from his previous IP’s (available on CodePlex...

Please join us for a high level discussion into Microsoft software investments designed to cover most of the major product lines.  This will be a 35,000 foot view into the following areas: Windows Family Virtualization Office System Unified Communications...

Following the release of System Center 2012 Release Candidate, Microsoft is pleased to announce the availability of the Release Candidate of the Orchestrator Integration Packs for the following System Center 2012 components: System Center 2012 Virtual...

We will add a new product family to your WSUS server today – System Center . The System Center product family will contain updates for versions 2012 and higher of System Center products, which include System Center 2012 , a product that combines components...

Did you miss System Center Universe?  No problem.  The sessions were all recorded and are now available for viewing on demand here: http://www.systemcenteruniverse.com/Agenda?sf3213864=1   In case you missed it, this is the site for the...