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Welcome to installment #2. In case you missed installment #1 - Getting Started – here’s the link . With the Getting Started blog, you tried a few basic Windows PowerShell cmdlets. I hope you took a bit of time to explore what other cmdlets ...read more

Hello Configuration Manager administrators. It’s time to get acquainted with Windows PowerShell! We’ve finally introduced native Windows PowerShell support with System Center 2012 Configuration Manager SP1. Many of you know that Windows ...read more

The Application Catalog in System Center 2012 Configuration Manager allows users to browse, request, and install software that you make available to them. You might be wondering if you can tailor the Application Catalog capabilities to better suit your ...read more

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 ...read more

Around the office, we have more and more internal teams that are latching on to Orchestrator and wanting to use it for building all sorts of integrations and automations, but one of the things that comes up from time to time is how to get the ability ...read more

There are always interesting shortcuts and magical techniques to discover in PowerShell, and “splatting” is one of them. Splatting allows you to bundle a set of parameters into a hashtable and then simply using it as single parameter to a PowerShell function ...read more

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 ...read more

When we on the product team create an integration pack for a product, whether it’s for System Center or another Microsoft products, or even a 3rd-party product, our goal is not to try and replicate everything that product does in the form of runbook activities ...read more

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 ...read more

Using the Orchestrator Integration Toolkit’s Command-Line Activity Wizard, you can create your own custom activities really easily just by using a simple command line or one-line PowerShell script. When creating activities, you can specify parameters ...read more

Before I start, here are links to the previous parts of this series: Getting Deeper Information from Orchestrator via COM Getting Deeper Information from orchestrator via COM, part 2 In the last two posts, I showed how to connect to the COM interface ...read more

In the last post , I showed you how to use PowerShell to connect to the Orchestrator COM interface for getting (and setting) various types of information. Now I’m going to run through a quick demo of how to get things like global resources (variables ...read more

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: ...read more

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 ...read more

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 ...read more

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 ...read more

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 ...read more

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 ...read more

Attached is a PowerShell script that can be used to backup overrides and unsealed Management Packs from Operations Manager 2012, as well as OpsMgr 2007 R2 . This script is an update to the PS script that my friend Boris Y had written a while ago. The ...read more

Author: Yuri Diogenes - Senior Technical Writer Technical Reviewers: Cecilia Cole - Program Manager, Travis Plunk - Software Developer Engineer In our previous post , we demonstrated how to install the WSUS Role on Windows Server “8” using PowerShell ...read more

Microsoft’s own Jonathan Jordan recently posted a couple good articles over on his VMM blog, one regarding Technical Docs for VMM and the other his own personal PowerShell Cheat Sheet.  If you haven’t seen these yet then you’ll definitely want to ...read more

Here’s a new Knowledge Base article we published today. This one tells you how to update or add the product key in System Center 2012 Operations Manager: ===== Symptoms After you installing System Center 2012 Operations Manager, you may look at Help ...read more

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 ...read more

Authors: Travis Plunk , Software Developer Engineer Yuri Diogenes , Senior Technical Writer Technical Reviewers: Cecilia Cole, Program Manager In our previous post , we demonstrated how to install the WSUS Role on the Windows Server “8” Beta using the ...read more

I was looking through all of the new articles over on our TechNet Wiki and came across this one that I thought you might find useful.  It was written by Microsoft Premier Field Engineer Mazen Ahmed and it contains a few PowerShell commands that will ...read more