June, 2012

I just couldn’t resist having a little fun with the title of the article…but today’s topic is a little more serious. In the previous articles, IPs and Activities and How Those are Represented in the Database and SQL Sequel: More Useful Orchestrator Database...

This is a guest blog post from the illustrious Manoj Parvathaneni a Senior Support Escalation Engineer at Microsoft. Manoj knows a lot of things I don’t even know about because he works on gnarly customer problems all day everyday.  He asked me to...

Hello, We recently became aware of a complex piece of targeted malware known as “Flame” and immediately began examining the issue. As many reports assert, Flame has been used in highly sophisticated and targeted attacks and, as a result...

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...

Hello, At Microsoft, our commitment is to help ensure customer trust in their computing experience. That was the impetus for Trustworthy Computing, and central to that is the priority we place on taking the necessary actions to help protect our customers...

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...

I’ve put together a new TechNet Wiki page that is a “one stop shopping” index of the following things: · Forums · Galleries · Libraries (aka “docs”) · Survival Guides · Wikis · Engineering Team Blogs · Microsoft Employee Blogs · Community Blogs · MVP...

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...

Today, as a part of our continuing phased mitigation strategy recently discussed , we have initiated the additional hardening of Windows Update . We’ve also provided more information about the MD5 hash-collision attacks used by the Flame malware...

One of the major pieces of functionality in Orchestrator and in many of the Integration Packs the ability to monitor something (a database, a server) and start a runbook when a certain condition occurs. The monitor activities are used extensively by customers...

Hello -- Today we’re releasing our advance notification for the June security bulletin release, which is scheduled for Tuesday, June 12. This month’s release includes 7 bulletins addressing 28 vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows, Internet...

The Management Pack for managing Service Manager with Operations Manager is now available! You can get it from here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=29980 Reminder: for this release it is not possible to install a Operations Manager...

Exciting news from our partner Provance!   New versions of the Provance IT Asset Management Pack and the Provance Data Management Pack are now available for Microsoft System Center 2012 . In addition to enhanced performance and product experience...

Hello, As part of the phased mitigation strategy we outlined on the MSRC blog , an update was released with Security Advisory 2718704 that prevents unauthorized certificates from being used to attack Windows systems. In an effort to provide additional...

Check it out.  Taught by yours truly.  Funny thing – I took the exams too and actually missed a question.  :) https://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/tracks/system-center-2012-orchestrator-service-manager Abstract: ​In this course, we will...

I got a question posed to me in the form of a design change request for Orchestrator. And, true to fashion for Orchestrator, I pointed out that what was being asked for as a feature could be solved by the existing product by just architecting the runbook...

Hello, As we mentioned previously , Microsoft is releasing an update to further harden the Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) as a defense-in-depth precaution for our customers. This update is now available for download. As an additional measure...

Hello, As we mentioned previously , Microsoft is releasing an update to further harden the Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) as a defense-in-depth precaution for our customers. This update is now available for download. As an additional measure, we...

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...

Orchestrator 2012 introduced the capability to define a global Variable as encrypted. This now allowed admins to use variables to store passwords instead of typing them into lots of different places in runbooks. But if the variable is encrypted, how does...

Microsoft has released an update for Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) 3.0 Service Pack 2 (SP2). This article includes information about the contents of the update and how to obtain the update. The following Microsoft Knowledge Base articles describe...

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...

For Update Tuesday we’re releasing seven security bulletins – three Critical-class and four Important – addressing 26 unique CVEs to further improve the security postures of Microsoft Windows, Internet Explorer, Dynamics AX, Microsoft...

In OpsMgr 2012, we provided users the ability to create customized dashboards using the OpsMgr 2012 console. The GTM.exe tool provided in this blog allows you to build off these dashboard investments, in particular we allow you to accomplish three specific...

We recently assisted a customer that was having problems accessing the WEDM nodes in a remote ConfigMgr 2007 admin console if the user was not an admin on the remote site server. We checked WMI and DCOM permissions and everything appears to be configured...