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July 05, 2012
A common question if it comes to deployments is, how to add a computer (or user) to one or several Active Directory groups. As you probably know, I generally prefer using web services for any Active Directory related task, as this avoids a lot of typical issues like permission problems, adding ADSI to the WinPE etc. Luckily the Deployment Web Service , which is freely available on CodePlex , has some appropriate functions that allow us to fulfill this task. Adding a computer (or user) to a single...
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Filed under: Custom Scripts, Webservice, Active Directory, MDT, MDT 2012
August 30, 2011
With the release of version 7.3 of the Deployment Webservice ( Download ) a completely new part has been added, integrating some functions of Roger Zanders awesome SCCM Client Center Automation library for Deployment usage. This library enables you to execute certain SCCM Client related task directly on a client like forcing Software updates or refreshing the Machine Policy. The offered functions are mainly identical to the ones offered in the SCCM Client Center Integration Pack for Opalis . And...
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Filed under: Webservice, Microsoft Deployment, SCCM, MDT
August 30, 2011
With the updated Version 7.3 ( Download ) just being published, the growing number of available functions, covering more and more demands in todays deployments, it’s not only an advantage of having such a huge toolset available. In its default implementation, the Web Service is configured to execute actions under certain user account. While this makes it pretty easy to troubleshoot and verify the functions are working, everyone with access to this web service will now be able to execute actions,...
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Filed under: Webservice, Microsoft Deployment, SCCM, Active Directory, MDT
August 30, 2011
Today I published version 7.3 of the Deployment web service. Beside some small bug fixes and minor additions, three new features have been added: 1. SCCM Client Center support A completely new web service part has been added that’s exposing a couple of functions (55 to be accurate) from the SCCM Client Center automation library written by Roger Zander , giving the possibility to execute certain tasks on a client like pushing Software updates, refreshing the machine policy etc. A full list of functions...
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Filed under: Webservice, Microsoft Deployment, SCCM, Active Directory, MDT
April 07, 2011
After we have configured the connection to our Database and created our model ( see the last post for more details ), we will jump now to the creation of our new Web Service. Create a Web Service Lets save our changes and add a new item. As mentioned already in my last post , I personally prefer the “older” asmx style web services most of the time. So we choose “ Web Service ” template for now (if you can’t find it easily, simply search for it) and give it a name. I’ll use MDT.asmx for this...
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Filed under: Webservice, MDT, Entity Framework, Development, MMS
April 07, 2011
OK, (probably) my two last post regarding my MMS 2011 sessions, if I haven’t missed something important . To be able to make our Deployments more dynamic and as unattended as possible, we need to have all the information available, that we need to take decisions automatically . We typically use information from the local hardware, the customsettings.ini and maybe the MDT Database. If we are really advanced, we also make use of some web services like the Deployment Web Service to drive our deployment...
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Filed under: Webservice, MDT, Entity Framework, Database, Development, MMS
April 05, 2011
While preparing for a session about MDT enhancements at the MMS 2011 (find the video at DeploymentResearch ), Mikael Nyström had a very interesting idea for a web service demo. The idea was to implement something simple that allows to set a single or all locations into some kind of “Maintenance Mode”. Meaning if you have some server maintenance to do or maybe some global issues and you don’t want to have any new deployments starting, just go to a webpage and “switch off” the deployment for that particular...
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Filed under: Webservice, MDT, MMS
October 19, 2010
Roughly a year after the first public Beta and half a year after the initial release of Version 1 a new version of the MDT Web FrontEnd is getting closer. The new version will overcome a couple limitations of the first version plus it will get a whole bunch of new features. It’s still some work to do but I hope to have the first public Beta available at TechEd Europe 2010 . If you would like to support me on this project please read the bottom of this post. As an appetizer here are some first impressions...
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Filed under: Webservice, MDT, Frontend, TechEd
October 12, 2010
Two of the administrative tasks you often have to do after a SCCM based Deployment has finished is removing the computer from the OSD Collection it has been added to start the Deployment (you don’t really want to leave a computer in a collection with an active OSD advertisement, do you?), and to clear the last PXE Advertisement flag in cases the Deployment has been started via PXE. The latter is mainly interesting for testing purposes, where you need to re-image the same computers over and over again...
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Filed under: Webservice, SCCM, PXE
October 08, 2010
As a frequent reader of this blog you have probably seen already a couple posts where we had to execute a web service to accomplish a certain task or get a specific value, etc. MDT itself takes away a lot of the hassle you have to deal with normally, if working with web services. In their easiest way, you simply define the complete web service call in the customsettings.ini and let the Gather step do it’s magic. But sometimes this isn’t enough as we need to call these web services at a later point...
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Filed under: Custom Scripts, Webservice, MDT
August 12, 2010
I’m happy to announce the release of Version 7.1 of the Deployment web service . The biggest and probably most useful change in this release is the implementation of NLog as logging provider. As already described in a previous post Add logging to your applications - NLog for beginners it’s now possible to influence the logging at runtime. With this version the Active Directory and the SCCM/SMS parts of the Deployment web service have been updated with this new logging capabilities already. The MDT...
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Filed under: Webservice, Microsoft Deployment, SCCM, Active Directory, MDT
July 07, 2010
One of the most important aspects of your applications and scripts (beside their actual purpose) is to log information about the currently running actions. On daily usage it might be useful to just verify if everything is working OK, or to have some kind of reporting based on this (logparser is quite helpful for such tasks). But as soon as a problem arises, this information is of huge importance to troubleshoot the current problem. So actually you can’t log to much, only to less. Logging in...
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Filed under: Webservice, Frontend, Development
July 03, 2010
since my last post. And I just wanted to take the opportunity to send a quick “ I’m still alive ” and give an overview of what is going to happen in the next time. In the last two posts ( VCS - Part 1 , VCS - Part 2 ) I wrote about Version\Revision Control Systems in general and how they could be of use, even for scripting or administrative purposes (yes, one article is still waiting to be published ;-) ). As not being a professional developer those typical developer tools are sometimes still new...
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Filed under: Custom Scripts, Webservice, Active Directory, Boot Wizard, MDT, Frontend, Development
April 20, 2010
I’ve always been a big fan of the PrettyGoodFrontEnd written by Johan Arwidmark . Originally written as a FrontEnd for ZTI deployments on SMS with BDD 2007 it has recently been updated for ConfigMgr (SCCM) 2007 Deployments with MDT 2010 integration. Similar to the Custom Boot Wizard I’ve mentioned already a couple times on this blog, Johan is now also using webservices to query the necessary information from MDT, Active Directory and ConfigMgr (SCCM). For this he wrote his own webservice reduced...
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Filed under: Custom Scripts, Webservice, Microsoft Deployment, SCCM, Boot Wizard, MDT, Frontend
April 17, 2010
While it seems as I can’t make it to this years MMS in Las Vegas due to a huge plume of volcanic ash over Europe ( BBC News: Volcanic ash - Europe flights grounded for third day ) I thought I can at least do something useful and publish an update to the Deployment Webservice with some long requested new functions. I actually just wanted to publish an update to the current version but in the end there were so many new functions requested and added that it makes more sense to increment the version...
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Filed under: Webservice, Microsoft Deployment, MDT
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