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We’ve been getting a few support calls regarding an issue with System Center 2012 Configuration Manager and the recently released Windows Management Framework 3.0 update KB2506143 . Management points that are collocated with the client are experiencing ...read more

If you have tried editing knowledge in OpsMgr 2012 with Office 2012 you are likely to have run into this error “Could not load file or assembly ‘Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word” or as shown in the image below. Working with our support ...read more

Here’s a new Knowledge Base article we published. This one covers how to troubleshoot issues when adding a Hyper-V host in System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager. ===== Summary This article covers how to troubleshoot issues when adding a Hyper-V host ...read more

Here’s a new Knowledge Base article we published that talks about how to troubleshoot the “Needs Attention” and “Not Responding” host status in System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager. This is one you’ll probably want to add to your Favorites. === ...read more

In System Center 2012 Configuration Manager, the ‘Backup Site Server’ maintenance task may fail if the Backup Destination is set to a network share. An example is below: When this happens, the following errors are logged: SMSSQLBKUP.LOG Error: Backup ...read more

Hello, Shane Brasher here once again, following up DPM Certificate Troubleshooting–Part 1: General Troubleshooting and DPM Certificate Troubleshooting–Part 2: Registry with Part 3 of “DPM Certificate Authentication Troubleshooting”. In this session we ...read more

Consider the following scenario: When running setup for System Center 2012 Configuration Manager (ConfigMgr 2012), in the Setup window you receive the following warnings: <A communication error has been detected between the specified site system and ...read more

Hello, Shane Brasher here again. This article picks up from where DPM Certificate Troubleshooting–Part 1: General Troubleshooting left off. We are going to jump right in and look at a few failed scenarios when your DPM certificate related registry keys ...read more

In this post, I’m going to walk through most of Server Application Virtualization (SAV) with the intention of calling out all the different resources and techniques you can use to troubleshoot problems. I’ll go through installing the sequencer, doing ...read more

The spirit of this document is to provide you with a quick guide to troubleshooting System Center 2012 Data Protection Manager (DPM) Certificate authentication issues. This document assumes that you are already familiar with DPM 2012 and have a healthy ...read more

Consider a scenario where you have encountered issues with the installation of KB2720211 ( An update for Windows Server Update Services 3.0 Service Pack 2 is available ) which forced you to remove and reinstall WSUS. Afterward, when reinstalling 2720211 ...read more

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 ...read more

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 ...read more

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 ...read more

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 ...read more

When I was writing the article I posted a few days ago about importing IPs programmatically ( More Fun with COM: Importing Integration Packs via PowerShell ), I had to do a lot of testing to make sure the script was going to actually work and import the ...read more

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 ...read more

If you use the Import Application Wizard and see the error message dialog box in the following screenshot that says “Cannot find any application in the specified file to import”, it might be because of one of these reasons: The zip file ...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

The Configuration Manager console has been greatly improved in System Center 2012 Configuration Manager, which enhances its usability. In addition to improvements in performance and layout, the console now supports a quicker way to monitor the status ...read more

If you’re like me, you use the Runbook Tester a lot. And, if you’re like me, you get annoyed by always having to resize the window to maximize one area or another. For me, I use the logging section more than anything, so I want to maximize the size of ...read more

I see this question on internal discussions list every now and then, so I thought I'd answer it here to be helpful. The question was: Is there a maximum length for string parameters in the Initialize Data activity? And if the answer is “yes” – what would ...read more

You might see content mismatch warnings in System Center 2012 Configuration Manager when content validation runs and determines that there is a discrepancy between the expected list of packages in WMI on the distribution point and the packages in the ...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

There are times when you want to validate that the value of a property isn’t blank. For example, you could be checking the output value (published data) of an activity to make sure it’s not blank before proceeding. However, in the list of available comparisons ...read more