Browse by Tags

• Active Directory
• Boot Wizard
• Custom Scripts
• Entity Framework
• Frontend
• How To
• LINQ
• MDT
• MDT 2008
• Microsoft Deployment
• PXE
• SMS
• SQL
• Webservice

MDT Web FrontEnd – How To handle SCCM Packages

MDT has a built-in feature that allows you to install packages from SCCM on the fly during the Deployment process. More or less similar to installing applications from MDT . While this is great for dynamic deployments, it’s not that easy to use as you have to define the package with it’s package id and the program of the package to be run. A typical entry looks like MKO0023E:MDT – Install Microsoft Office 2007 I`m pretty sure that most of you that used this feature have spent already some time on...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: SCCM, MDT, Frontend, How To

Using a custom Boot wizard to boot known and unknown computers in SCCM and choose a Task Sequence to run – Step by Step

In some recent posts I wrote about how to create a custom boot wizard. During these posts I used an example which would be able to boot any known and unknown computer from SCCM, reads a list of available Collections having an OSD Task Sequence advertised to choose from, then drop the computer into one of these collections on the fly and wait until the Advertisement would be available for the computer before handing over to the Task Sequence engine which would then query the SCCM Server for an advertised...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: Webservice, Microsoft Deployment, SCCM, Boot Wizard, MDT, Frontend

IP Range Boundary format stored in Active Directory changed with SCCM 2007 SP2

OK, this is probably one of these articles that only a few people are interested in, but hey why not. The Internet is a mish-mash of information, so let’s add another piece to it ;-) As some of you might know, the Deployment webservice is able to identify the SCCM site code and assigned site code for a computer by querying Active Directory which is actually a nice feature as this is easier to query than the SCCM SLP. Anyway since SP2 there has been (at least) one change in the way SCCM is storing...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: SCCM, Active Directory

Using LINQ and the Entity Framework to query SMS/SCCM

Even if this title doesn’t mean anything to you, just bear with me for a moment. I’m about to show you a nice and easy way to query a database (the SMS/SCCM Database in this case) and this even for all records which have specific bits in a bitmask set as it happens quite often within SCCM. Recently I had to query some information from SCCM again I wanted to use within my MDT Web FrontEnd . I wanted to have a list of all available packages and be able to search within this list. Additionally return...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: SQL, SCCM, SMS, Entity Framework, LINQ

Create your custom Boot Wizard - Make it available for all known and unknown Computers

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...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: MDT 2008, Microsoft Deployment, SCCM, Boot Wizard, PXE

Create your custom Boot Wizard - Execute the Wizard, process the results and create the Boot Image

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...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: MDT 2008, Custom Scripts, Microsoft Deployment, SCCM, Boot Wizard

Create your custom Boot Wizard - Display dynamic data

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...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: MDT 2008, Custom Scripts, Webservice, Microsoft Deployment, SCCM, Boot Wizard

Get SMS/SCCM Information from Active Directory

During Deployments (also in other situations but this Blog is more about Deployments) you sometimes need to gather some information about the existing SMS/SCCM Infrastructure. Mainly things like the SiteCode for a specific computer or even more important the assignedSiteCode (From the assigned Primary Site) and the siteServers responsible for these sites. How do we get this information? The easiest way is probably hardcoding this information somewhere. We could store it in the cs.ini if using MDT...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: SCCM, Active Directory

A Webservice for OSD and MDT Deployments

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...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: MDT 2008, Webservice, Microsoft Deployment, SCCM, SMS, Active Directory

Using Roles to deploy Applications based on previous Applications - Part 1 (ZTI - Refresh Scenario)

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...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: MDT 2008, SQL, Microsoft Deployment, SCCM, SMS