April, 2012

The OpsMgr 2012 Sizing Helper is an interactive document designed to assist you with planning & sizing deployments of System Center 2012 Operations Manager. It helps you plan the correct amount of infrastructure needed for a new OpsMgr 2012 deployment...

Here’s another cool WSUS article I found over on our TechNet Wiki page this morning. This one describes and issue where a search for updates returns declined updates on the Windows Server 8 beta: Consider a scenario where the following tasks are performed...

Here’s one more article on WSUS that I found over on our TechNet Wiki page today. This one describes and issue where publishing an update larger than 2GB in size will fail: Consider a scenario where the following tasks are performed in WSUS running on...

I am pleased to announce the that the WS-Management/SMASH Device Discovery Template for System Center 2012 (Operations Manager) is live and available to customers in the download center . This template enables customers to scan for their WS-Management...

Today we have released the Visio 2010 Add-in and SharePoint 2010 Data Extensions for System Center 2012 (Operations Manager). For those not familiar with it this enabled customers to create highly customized Visio diagrams – either by exporting...

Here’s a new Knowledge Base article we published today. This one walks you through monitoring txt and CSV log files in System Center Operations Manager: ===== Summary Configuring System Center Operations Manager to monitor plain text and delimited text...

Time and patience are required when creating App-V packages and testing them on various operating systems. You should always target your packages for the right operating system (OS), but testing shows that a package made for one Windows OS may run on...

Check out Baskar Narayanan's blog post about delivering predictable and efficient Microsoft Office 365 services using System Center 2012. Read Baskar's post on the Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform blog . ...read more

Service Level Management was a major investment area for us in System Center 2012.  The functionality we had in SCSM 2010 was very limited.  You could really only track the resolution time of incidents. Even then you could only set target resolution...

Here’s a new Knowledge Base article we published today. This one spells out the official Microsoft support policy for third-party apps running in a Microsoft Server Application Virtualization (Server App-V) environment: ===== Summary This article covers...

Across the IT industry, the term “transaction” is used in many different ways and with a variety of subtly-different meanings. In System Center 2012 – Operations Manager, the APM (“.NET application performance monitoring”) feature also uses the term ...

Here’s another new Knowledge Base article we published today. This one spells out the official Microsoft support policy for Microsoft apps running in a Server Application Virtualization (Server App-V) environment: ===== Summary This article covers the...

The Microsoft Solution Accelerators team recently announced their latest release – Application Approval Workflow. It is now available for beta download! · Join the Application Approval Workflow Solution Accelerator Beta program now. (Windows Live ID required...

Note: this blog post is relative to System Center 2012 – Service Manager (or later) only. This is a guest blog post from one of our community experts – Greg Wojkun.  Thanks for sharing with us Greg! ======================== Background Our change...

Here’s a new Knowledge Base article we published recently. This one is a hotfix for an issue where a ConfigMgr 2007 SP2 task to install a virtual application that is located on an App-V distribution point that has streaming enabled hangs (stops responding...

The entry window for the first annual BlueHat Prize closed at 11:59pm PDT on April 1. We've been eagerly awaiting a final entry count from the contest organizers, and senior security strategist Katie Moussouris has just posted that tally on the EcoStrat...

Here’s a quick FYI on a couple new System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) articles I found over in our community-driven TechNet Wiki. If you are planning on rolling out VMM, or if you already have, you’ll probably want to add these to your Favorites...

Here’s a cool article I found while going through what was new over on our community-driven TechNet Wiki . This one discusses some best practices for WSUS that should ease Microsoft  Forefront Endpoint Protection and Client Security deployments....

Microsoft’s own Karri Alexion-Tiernan just announced two new virtualization betas you’ll want to check out. The first is a new product to Microsoft’s Desktop Virtualization family – User Experience Virtualization (UE-V). The second is an update to our...

Here are a couple more VMM troubleshooting articles I stumbled across over in our TechNet Wiki this morning. The first is on troubleshooting BITS and the second is on WMI: Troubleshoot VMM: BITS Troubleshooting : http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki...

Hello, Today we’re releasing our advance notification for the April security bulletin release, which is scheduled for Tuesday, April 10. This month’s release includes 6 bulletins addressing 11 vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows, Microsoft...

While we haven’t tested this approach specifically on the product team, one of our newly minted MVPs Anton Gritsenko, has figured out how to use Office 365 as the outbound notification server from Service Manager.  The approach still requires a on...

We recently announced the release of a beta of the Application Approval Workflow Solution Accelerator. We then announced that we were giving away an XBox and gift cards for people that downloaded it, tried it out, and provided us feedback. Thanks to all...

This is a guest blog post.  Originally it was written by Dejan Milic in German .  It was translated by Andreas Baumgarten into English.  Thanks you two for contributing this helpful blog post to the community! =========================...

We’ve recently been making some announcements about the Application Approval Workflow (AAW) Solution Accelerator.  Demo . One of the first conclusions people come to regarding this solution accelerator is: “This solution accelerator requires the...