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March 02, 2010
In the Last Post I showed you, how you can easily create a custom Setting in the MDT Database and use it in your custom scripts. In the example shown we added a custom Setting called “ CollectionID ” to the Database to enable some kind of Pre-staging for computers. With the example you would e.g. be able to pre-stage computer based on their SerialNumber in the MDT Database and then add it on the fly to the appropriate collection on the fly when pxe/cd booting the new computer. Very helpful if your...
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Filed under: MDT 2008, Microsoft Deployment, Frontend, MDT 2010, How To
March 01, 2010
Finally it’s done! I’m very happy to announce the release of version 1.0 of the MDT Web FrontEnd . It took a bit longer than expected since the last Beta from November 2009 but a lot of nice things needed to be added. But first, what is the MDT Web FrontEnd ? The MDT Web FrontEnd is a web based alternative for the MDT configuration database. It is 100% compatible to current MDT 2008, MDT 2008 Update 1 and MDT 2010 database installations running on SQL 2005 or 2008. Optionally (and recommended...
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Filed under: MDT 2008, Microsoft Deployment, MDT, Frontend, MDT 2010
January 25, 2010
In the last Post I showed you how you can use the MDT Web FrontEnd to restrict access to the MDT Deployment database. Following this you are able to restrict e.g. a Helpdesk User to only add and edit computers but that he/she can’t do anything else on Locations, Roles or MakeModels. But everybody who has access to the Settings of an Identity will still be able to see and maybe also change all Settings. This raises several problems. A User might still be able to see more then he is supposed to see...
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Filed under: MDT 2008, MDT, Frontend, MDT 2010, How To
January 17, 2010
The MDT Deployment Database is a great utility for your Deployments, no matter if you are using it in LTI or ZTI scenarios. Tim Mintner recently wrote an interesting article about what the Database is and why one should use it . If you use the Deployment console to access the database it has (at least) one major drawback, especially in larger Deployments. Out of the box, the console is the only way of accessing and changing the database (beside using the SQL Management Studio and making changes directly...
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Filed under: MDT 2008, MDT, Frontend, MDT 2010, How To
April 18, 2009
This is the final article of a series creating a custom Boot wizard to dynamically choose the Task Sequence to run on the local computer. (See Create your custom Boot Wizard - some advanced stuff , Create your custom Boot Wizard - Display dynamic data and Create your custom Boot Wizard - Execute the Wizard, process the results and create the Boot Image for Reference). Now we will make this Boot Image available to all our clients no matter if they are already known to ConfigMgr/SCCM or not. We will...
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Filed under: MDT 2008, Microsoft Deployment, SCCM, Boot Wizard, PXE
April 18, 2009
In the last two articles Create your custom Boot Wizard - some advanced stuff and Create your own Boot Wizard - Display dynamic data we created a Custom Boot Wizard which requests a list of available OSD Task Sequences (we actually get the collections the Task Sequences are advertised to) and shows this dynamic list to the user to chose from. In this article we now will create a script which will call our custom Boot Wizard and process the results of the users choice. If you deploy a Boot Image via...
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Filed under: MDT 2008, Custom Scripts, Microsoft Deployment, SCCM, Boot Wizard
April 18, 2009
What we are trying to built here is a Boot Wizard which will show a dynamic list of available OSD Task Sequences from SCCM 2007 to choose from. The chosen Task Sequence shall then be executed on the local computer. To ease our job regarding the final deployment and the management of the Boot Images, we want to have a single Boot Image to be used for WDS/PXE/CD Deployment for all known and unknown computers. In the last article ( Create your custom Boot Wizard - some advanced stuff ) we dived into...
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Filed under: MDT 2008, Custom Scripts, Webservice, Microsoft Deployment, SCCM, Boot Wizard
April 01, 2009
This is the first part in a series of articles about custom Boot Images in SCCM 2007 R2. It will cover the creation of a custom Boot Wizard and making it available for all known and unknown computers. We will be able to choose from a list of available Task Sequences and talk to the right SMS Server of the assigned site. It will be a lot of stuff but just stay with me, I would say it's worth the time spent reading. In this article we will cover the creation of a custom Boot Wizard. It will show...
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Filed under: MDT 2008, Microsoft Deployment, Boot Wizard
February 16, 2009
The Settings within the MDT Database cover already a wide area of possibilities during a Deployment. But sooner or later you will probably reach a point, where you are in the need of adding or processing additional information. Think about Static IP Address assignment or prestaging a specific CollectionID for Deployment via SCCM, etc. There are probably a lot of things you might want to have. At least I reached this point quite soon during our deployments and started adding a new table for this and...
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Filed under: MDT 2008, Webservice, SQL, Microsoft Deployment
February 11, 2009
In the first posts I showed how you can create ( Create your own MDT Webservice - Part 1 , Create your own MDT Webservice - Part 2 ) and access ( Calling a webservice from a script using MDT 2008 ) a simple webservice to be used in Deployments to ease access to the MDT Database. In the last post you could find a complete set of stored procedures do manipulate the MDT Database on-the-fly ( Get access to the MDT Database ). Now we are going to combine this. For the ones just interested to download...
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Filed under: MDT 2008, Webservice, Microsoft Deployment, SCCM, SMS, Active Directory
January 31, 2009
The Title could be a bit misleading so what is this about? After we started with our Deployments we regularly came to a point where we needed to change, add or delete certain values within the MDT Database. You might think of adding Roles to a computer on-the-fly, prestaging a new computer with some different settings, giving a local siteadmin access to a subset of his location settings etc. And you really don't want to give the Helpdesk access to the Deployment Workbench and with it access to...
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Filed under: MDT 2008, SQL, Microsoft Deployment
December 29, 2008
One common question regarding the deployment of a new operating system especially on refresh or replacement scenarios is how the user will get his previous applications back. All standard applications are probably already part of your thick image or will be defined as standard applications for all users or a specific location etc. However you will always have a bunch of applications which only a certain amount of users will use. And normally you don't want to spend time after the deployment to...
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Filed under: MDT 2008, SQL, Microsoft Deployment, SCCM, SMS
December 29, 2008
Within MDT you can define your specific settings via computer definition, Make/Model, Location or Roles. Also Applications in LTI or Packages in SCCM can be defined this way. But instead of assigning the applications/packages directly to a location or computer I suggest to use roles instead. This means you define a role per application you would like to distribute during your deployment process with the appropriate applications/packages setting. Then you assign this role to all computers, model or...
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Filed under: MDT 2008, Microsoft Deployment
December 25, 2008
After implementing the function to Update the Computerinformation in MDT as explained in the last post, I found more and more settings from the MDT Database I wanted to get or set during the execution of the scripts. So instead of reading the complete set of settings for an entry I started creating similar functions to get/set the Computername, the UDDir, etc. But just after a couple of settings it was obvious that this couldn't be the final solution. The MDT settings table contains 84 different...
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Filed under: MDT 2008, Webservice, SQL
December 23, 2008
Now as we know how to create our own webservice and how to use it from a script , we can go ahead to the more useful topics. We actually want to extend the current MDT implementation. So I would like to start with a function which was already quite useful on a couple of different implementations. We want to have an easy way to update the Computer information, mainly Serial Number, MAC Address and UUID. The benefit might not be obvious but to give you an example. We use this to prestage a computer...
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Filed under: MDT 2008, Custom Scripts, Webservice, SQL
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