November 2009 - Posts

Intel vPro Expert Center Blog: Renaming AMT-Based Computers and Domain Changes in SCCM environment
30 November 09 03:51 PM | rodtrent | with no comments

 

I have been asked by several customers about the following scenario: I have a vPro system that was provisioned by my SCCM environment and I want to change the system name post this provisioning process.  How does the MEBx information get updated after the OS name change to keep the system in sync?

Intel vPro Expert Center Blog: Renaming AMT-Based Computers and Domain Changes in SCCM environment

Filed under: System Center, ConfigMgr 2007, vPro, Intel, AMT

Just in time for the holidays – the myITforum Amazon.com shopping portal…
30 November 09 03:50 PM | rodtrent | with no comments

Each year we roll out the fabled myITforum Amazon.com shopping portal graphic.  This year is no exception.  If you jump out to the main page of myITforum.com right now you’ll see the graphic at the top right. 

Why?

The majority of people shop at Amazon.com anyway, so we have partnered with Amazon.com to provide a click-through link straight to Amazon.com.  But, the link does a bit more than just take you to Amazon.com, it also provides a special link for myITforum’ers so that any purchases you make at Amazon.com during the holidays generates a small percentage of revenue to help myITforum.com’s financial needs.

Financial needs?  Oh yeah.  Did you know that myITforum.com employs 3 people and the site also incurs a significant operating cost during the year for hosting, development, administration, etc.?  Everything to you on myITforum.com is free, and will always stay that way.  But, to keep the lights on we do have financial needs.  myITforum.com started small way back when, but has blossomed into the defacto site for all things System Center and Systems Management.  The ever-growing amount of traffic is staggering.  If I showed you the stats you’d probably pass out and wonder how we’ve managed over the years.

So, just a simple Amazon.com icon on the site is a small way for you to give back – without giving back.  Just a simple click through our Amazon.com shopping portal costs you nothing, but provides a good deal of value to us if you use Amazon.com to make any holiday purchases.  It won’t keep the lights on, but it definitely helps.

 

P.S. Feel free to send the info to friends and family.

Filed under: Community, myITforum.com

Last Day to Submit System Center Influencer Blog Contest Entries
30 November 09 03:36 PM | rodtrent | with no comments

Influencers: Today is the last day to submit your November blog entries for the contest! Blog on "The Microsoft platform and application management with System Center" and email it to scnetsup@microsoft.com for a chance to win a $100 gift card!

Contest Overview: https://sharepoint.connect.microsoft.com/SystemCenterCommunity/ExtraContent4.aspx

Contest Rules: https://sharepoint.connect.microsoft.com/SystemCenterCommunity/ExtraContent2.aspx

List of content ideas: https://sharepoint.connect.microsoft.com/SystemCenterCommunity/Growsubdetail1.aspx

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And for those of you who want to get a jump on next month's contest, the December theme is "Microsoft System Center Solutions for datacenter management". Blog about this topic and submit your entries to scnetsup@microsoft.com by December 31st. To help inspire you, check out the December Content Ideas.

Filed under: Community, Blogging, Microsoft, System Center Influencers

The official MMS 2010 marketing kit is coming…
30 November 09 03:35 PM | rodtrent | with no comments

Look for an announcement soon on a downloadable marketing kit (banners, web buttons, etc.) for MMS 2010…

Filed under: Community, MMS, MMS 2010

Quest Management Xtensions
30 November 09 02:10 PM | rodtrent | with no comments

 QMX Monitoring for Operations Manager and MOM

Monitor Extensions

Filed under: System Center, OpsMgr 2007

1e Shopping Application Webinar
30 November 09 07:32 AM | rodtrent | with no comments

 

Is Your Organization Suffering from Application Sprawl?

Time to go Shopping™ For a Typical ROI of Between 3-6 Months!

Join one of two webinars on Thursday 3^rd December and Wednesday 9^th December at 16.00 GMT to find out how 1E can help your organization reduce the overall cost of IT, increase operational efficiencies and foster greater energy savings through automation and software license control.

Register Here

More About Shopping™

Our self-service provisioning tool Shopping has a built-in application rental feature, which enables individual users to select the application they want when they want it. Expensive applications that are only needed for a short period of time can be temporarily deployed, providing your organization with significant license cost savings.  By eliminating the complexities of software provisioning and automating the request, approval, delivery and license control process, Shopping also dramatically reduces helpdesk support time.

What’s New with Shopping 3.1?

The key new features of version 3.1 include:

· Branch Office Administration - enabling delegation of administrative tasks so that app publication and approval can now be done either centrally or at a branch level, allowing organizations to save costs by delegating systems management control to branch administrators.

· Advanced Category Management - full Interactive directory integration allowing individual departments the right to restrict access to certain applications based upon the PC from which the request is being made

· Increased Platform Support - for a wider range of platforms including Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008

This new release of Shopping 3.1 also offers enhanced scalability and performance, multi-domain and Unicode support enabling application name and description displays in foreign language character sets such as Chinese and Japanese. Shopping is fully integrated with Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager and Active Directory.

Proven success

By deploying Shopping, our customer Peterborough City Council has seen cost savings in terms of money spent on support calls relating to the availability of new software for users. Similarly, Reed Elsevier* saw productivity savings when it gave individual users the freedom to select and install the authorized applications they wanted.

I look forward to welcoming you on the webinar.

Kind regards

Emily

Emily Morbey | Marketing Assistant | 1E

Office:+44 (0)208 326 3497  Mobile:+44  (0)7815 306741

emily.morbey@1e.com | www.1e.com

myITforum.com, Inc.

Filed under: 1E

Black Screen woes could affect millions on Windows 7, Vista and XP
30 November 09 07:23 AM | rodtrent | with no comments

 

Firstly, there appears to be many causes of of the black screen issue. The symptoms are very distinctive and troublesome. After starting your Windows 7, Vista, XP, NT, W2K, W2K3 or W2K8 PC or server the system appears normal. However, after logging on there is no desktop, task bar, system tray or side bar. Instead you are left with a totally black screen and a single My Computer Explorer window. Even this window might be minimized making it hard to see.

If you have these symptoms you can safely try our free Black Screen Fix. It will fix the most common cause we have seen of this issue.

Black Screen woes could affect millions on Windows 7, Vista and XP

Filed under: Patch Management, Windows, Windows 7

Managing Your Virtual World - Tech Focus November 2009 Part 2 | Media | TechNet Edge
28 November 09 03:44 PM | rodtrent | with no comments

 

In the previous post “Managing your Microsoft world” the focus was on management of Windows Servers and the applications that run on them regardless of if they are physical machines or virtual machines. This post focuses more on the virtualization infrastructure and looking primarily at Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager.

To recap the previous post, System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 or System Center Essentials 2007 are not particular about whether the servers they are monitoring are physical or virtual; both products happily manage servers in either configuration. When you implement virtualization, management of these virtualized servers does not change from when they were physical; maintenance tasks still need to performed, albeit some are handled differently. An example is the task of ensuring there is enough space on the machine’s discs. For a physical server this could mean cleaning up or compressing old files, or buying a new disk. For virtual servers this may mean moving the VHD file to a different storage device so it can grow, or simply creating and add a new VHD file to the virtual machine.

Read more:

Managing Your Virtual World - Tech Focus November 2009 Part 2 | Media | TechNet Edge

Filed under: Virtualization

The Manageability Guys : More On SCCM and Powershell
27 November 09 11:47 AM | rodtrent | with no comments

 

I thought I would add to our previous post on Powershell. Powershell can make SCCM admin far easier for repetitive tasks.  To make life really easy we can start creating our own “cmdlets”. Anyone can write their own cmdlets for Powershell but it’s heavy duty coding so we’re going to fake it by adding functions into a profile. Profiles are loaded when powershell starts so the functions created are available at the powershell console. By giving the functions sensible names then using them with powershell makes it seem as if we’ve created our own cmdlets.

The Manageability Guys : More On SCCM and Powershell

Filed under: Windows PowerShell, System Center, ConfigMgr 2007

Let's dive deeper in ConfigMgr R3
27 November 09 08:32 AM | rodtrent | with no comments

 

In the first week of September the ConfigMgr product team announced ConfigMgr R3. This release is delivered to introduce some new features which are also covered in the next version of ConfigMgr which is planned for the year 2011.

In this post I will discuss ConfigMgr R3 in more detail. One of the first announced new features is Power Management.

Let's dive deeper in ConfigMgr R3

Filed under: System Center, ConfigMgr 2007

Shopping 3.1 Launch Webinar
26 November 09 03:14 PM | rodtrent | with no comments

Is Your Organization Suffering from Application Sprawl?

Time to go Shopping™ For a Typical ROI of Between 3-6 Months!

Join one of two webinars on Thursday 3^rd December and Tuesday 9^th December at 16.00 GMT to find out how 1E can help your organization reduce the overall cost of IT, increase operational efficiencies and foster greater energy savings through automation and software license control.

Register Here

More About Shopping™

Our self-service provisioning tool Shopping has a built-in application rental feature, which enables individual users to select the application they want when they want it. Expensive applications that are only needed for a short period of time can be temporarily deployed, providing your organization with significant license cost savings.  By eliminating the complexities of software provisioning and automating the request, approval, delivery and license control process, Shopping also dramatically reduces helpdesk support time.

What’s New with Shopping 3.1?

The key new features of version 3.1 include:

· Branch Office Administration - enabling delegation of administrative tasks so that app publication and approval can now be done either centrally or at a branch level, allowing organizations to save costs by delegating systems management control to branch administrators.

· Advanced Category Management - full Interactive directory integration allowing individual departments the right to restrict access to certain applications based upon the PC from which the request is being made

· Increased Platform Support - for a wider range of platforms including Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008

This new release of Shopping 3.1 also offers enhanced scalability and performance, multi-domain and Unicode support enabling application name and description displays in foreign language character sets such as Chinese and Japanese. Shopping is fully integrated with Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager and Active Directory.

Proven success

By deploying Shopping, our customer Peterborough City Council has seen cost savings in terms of money spent on support calls relating to the availability of new software for users. Similarly, Reed Elsevier* saw productivity savings when it gave individual users the freedom to select and install the authorized applications they wanted.

Filed under: Software Management, 1E

Kevin Holman's OpsMgr Blog : Tuning tip – turning off some over-collection of events
25 November 09 07:28 PM | rodtrent | with no comments

 

We often think of tuning OpsMgr by way of tuning “Alert Noise”…. by disabling rules that generate alerts that we don't care about, or modifying thresholds on monitors to make the alert more actionable for our specific environment.

However – one area of OpsMgr that often goes overlooked, is event overcollection.  This has a cost… because these events are collected and create LAN/WAN traffic, agent overhead, OpsDB size bloat, and especially, DataWarehouse size bloat.  I have worked with customers who had a data warehouse that was over one third event data….. and they had ZERO requirement for this nor did they want it.  They were paying for disk storage, and backup expense, plus added time and resources on the framework, all for data they cared nothing about.

MOST of these events, are enabled out of the box, and are default OpsMgr collect rules from the “System Center Core Monitoring” MP.  These events are items like "config requested”, “config delivered”, “new config active”.  They might be interesting, but there is no advanced analysis included to use these to detect a problem.  In small environments, they are not usually a big deal.  But in large agent count environments, these events can account for a LOT of data, and provide little value unless you are doing something advanced in analyzing them.  I have yet to see a customer who did that.

Kevin Holman's OpsMgr Blog : Tuning tip – turning off some over-collection of events

Filed under: System Center, OpsMgr 2007

The Deployment Guys : Windows 7 RTM Issue with Group Policy Enforced Wallpaper
25 November 09 06:34 PM | rodtrent | with no comments

 

I was asked by our Support folks to let you know about an issue that effects Windows 7 when you try to set the desktop wallpaper through Group Policy.  I am blogging this on the Deployment Guys blog because the issue can be avoided by a configuration item in the image build.

The Deployment Guys : Windows 7 RTM Issue with Group Policy Enforced Wallpaper

Filed under: Microsoft Deployment, Group Policy, Active Directory, Windows 7

Nexus SC: The System Center Team Blog : Live Meeting for Influencers: System Center for Exchange 2010 on 12.2.09 at 10:00 am PST
25 November 09 03:15 PM | rodtrent | with no comments

 

Mark your calendars! On Wednesday, December 2, 10:00AM PST, we are hosting a Live Meeting presentation for System Center influencers on “Managing the New Mail Infrastructure:  What you need to know about System Center for Exchange 2010,” presented by Leslie Kitz, Microsoft Product Manager. 

Join information is available on the System Center Influencers Program portal.  Members of the program will need to log into the Connect site to access the Live Meeting join information.

This Live Meeting presentation is exclusive to members of the Influencer Program.  Not a member?  Visit the program information page on TechNet to learn more and apply to join.

Abstract: System Center increases Exchange availability to help you meet your SLAs.  Hear about the new Operations Manager MP for Exchange 2010, which offers deeper, more granular monitoring than its predecessor.  See why Data Protection Manager 2010 complements Exchange’s native resiliency and is the right back-up solution for Exchange 2010.

Nexus SC: The System Center Team Blog : Live Meeting for Influencers: System Center for Exchange 2010 on 12.2.09 at 10:00 am PST

Filed under: System Center, Events, Exchange, System Center Influencers

SharePoint Search Tip: “Unknown Error. Troubleshoot issues with Windows SharePoint Services.”
25 November 09 07:29 AM | rodtrent | with no comments

This is a really obscure error message when SharePoint search is not working on your site (thanks Microsoft).  And, really, unless you know what’s going on, there’s really no way to troubleshoot this one.  When you or users are trying to perform a search and you are getting the error message:

 

“Unknown Error. Troubleshoot issues with Windows SharePoint Services.”

 

Try this:

 

Go to: Central Administration -> Operations -> Global Configuration -> alternate access mappings.

Add the your website’s website via the Add internal URLS button and set it to Internet.

Filed under: Sharepoint