April, 2012

I see a lot of requests from people creating integrations with Orchestrator to get information about some of the inner workings of an installation, beyond what’s available via the web service. The web service allows you to retrieve information about:...

Here’s a new Knowledge Base article we published this morning. This one talks about an issue you can run into if your AD groups have circular references. ===== Symptoms After changing the Self-Service Owner of a Virtual Machine (VM) to an AD Security...

One of the threads I’ve seen going around the Orchestrator discussion list recently is how to run the Runbook Tester as another user. The Runbook Tester is launched from the Runbook Designer and automatically loads the runbook currently being edited....

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...

A couple of weeks ago, Karl Prosser posted an interesting article on using PowerShell v3 with Orchestrator .And, while at MMS last week, I had an opportunity to sit down and run through one of the PowerShell v3 hands-on labs that were available. In that...

Using the “Initialize Data” activity at the beginning of a runbook allows you to provide input parameters to any runbook. This greatly enhances the flexibility of a runbook by allowing it to be called by another runbook or via the web service, and the...

The Documentation Library for System Center 2012 Configuration Manager and the Configuration Manager 2007 Documentation Library have been updated on the web and the latest content has Updated: April 1, 2012 at the top of the topic. For those of you...

I recently saw a new feature suggestion in the Orchestrator feedback on Connect and I realized that we can actually accomplish the requested functionality today in Orchestrator, so I thought I’d share how. Here is the feedback from the customer: There...

One of the features in Orchestrator is “Variables”. These are globally-available, statically-defined values (hence the running joke that they’re not actually “variables”, they’re “constants”). They provide a good way to define values that you re-use over...

In this second blog of mine, along with my coworker Partha Chandran, we are going to talk about the Distribution Point migration from Configuration Manager 2007 using the migration feature of System Center 2012 Configuration Manager. Before we dive into...

Right before the Microsoft Management Summit 2012 I was preparing my demo environment for a session.  During the preparation I encountered some problems on one of the  demo hosts.  The troubled  host was in a “Needs Attention” status...

In case you haven't seen these links, there are two new papers published on how Microsoft deployed ConfigMgr in our desktop environment. Quite a few of the blog posts on this System Center in Action page are related to the work that went into the deployment...

Hi everyone, Tyler Franke here again with another troubleshooting tip for you. When you’re in the System Center Configuration Manager 2007 administrative console and trying to download software updates to an update list, it may fail with an error stating...

Hello everyone, John Behneman here again. The purpose of the article is to highlight some very simple OSD file edits/tweaks that can potentially fix a large number of most common issues we see here in product support. Chances are you can save yourself...

Here’s a new Knowledge Base article we published today. This one shows you how to quickly fix an issue where a P2V in System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager fails when using NIC teaming. ===== Symptoms When using System Center 2012 Virtual Machine...

While at MMS last week, it was apparent that many people were still finding out about Orchestrator. One of the most common comments I heard was something like “I really think Orchestrator is cool, but I already have a Service Manager-like tool in place...

Now that System Center 2012 Configuration Manager has released, we have some KB articles that describe a few of the things we saw during the beta that you may run into. Nothing really major, just a few tips and FYIs you may want to be aware of. If you...

In the last post , I showed how to create a configuration for an activity that shows up in the options menu. I also showed how you can use that configuration setting to modify the actions of the activity at runtime. In this post, I’ll show you how to...

Now that System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager has released, we have some KB articles that describe a few of the things we saw during the beta that you may run into. Nothing really major, just some tips and FYIs you may want to be aware of. If you...

Hi Everyone, Vivek Kumar here from the Data Protection Manager (DPM) support team. DPM 2010 comes with Bare Metal Restore (BMR) capabilities that are much talked about and have helped us in many of our crucial disaster recovery scenarios. Many of my friends...

Hi everyone, Mark Stanfill here. Running Process Monitor (ProcMon) to troubleshoot Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) client issues such as missing files, access denied errors or other file and registry-based issues is sometimes necessary to...

Yesterday, I wrote about how to debug a custom activity using Visual Studio . Today I’m going to show you how to add an item to the Options Menu so that you can have a reusable configuration setting that can be used across multiple activities in an IP...

This blog post will cover a portion of my MMS session (AM-B316) and will be useful if you're looking to familiarize yourself with some of the key value propositions of Server App-V. This post will allow you to: Grasp how packaging using the Server...

System Center Data Protection Manager 2010 supports protection of computers in workgroups and untrusted domains using local accounts and NTLM, however in scenarios where an organization does not allow creation of local accounts this solution does not...

One of the first questions people have when they start writing custom Orchestrator activities using the SDK is “How do I step through my code?”. After all, activities are not executables, they’re just classes. And, it’s not until the classes are packaged...