November 2011 Meeting Notes

Thanks to Tom Grezek for stepping in as our new Microsoft sponsor (Kevin Remde also offered to help when needed as did Tim Benjamin).

We had almost 60 people show up last night and fortunately, we were able to get shifted to the larger room thanks to the receptionist (can't recall her name).

I went over the new features of RC1 in CM12. About 6-7 people say they have RC in the lab. But nobody seemed to have a set goal of rolling it out next year.

Here is a shot of the ADR buildup I was talking about when you make one daily for EP:

Someone asked about being able to pull just a registry key back in inventory. DCM is the obvious choice here, but evidently .NET isn't fully deployed (I say deploy it!). So I asked Sherry how to go about grabbing just the key when no actual value is needed. Here is her reply:

If he uses regkeytomof, here's what I'd do:

Presuming that the key is under HKLM\Software...
Point regkeytomof at Software, and check the box about "Dynamic Instances." After he copies out the stuff, either delete the extra junk or change most of it to FALSE, the only thing left as TRUE would be KeyName.

Sure, he'll get instances of every single key until HKLM\Software... but he'll get the one he is looking for that way. This is really bloating to the DB, not as clean... but it would work. It would be less bloaty if the key he is looking for is under HKLM\Software\Widgets.
i.e., the key he is looking for is HKLM\Software\Widgets\ThisKeyHere

If he does dynamic instances against HKLM\Software\Widgets, and only leave TRUE on Keyname, he'll just get the subkeys under \Widgets.

Finally, Steve Jesok shared some PowerShell code and I'll post that seperately. Looks like we'll have PowerShell for CM as a session in January. For those of you with any tips or code you'd like to share, we'll make sure you have a chance to speak up too. And in keeping with the previous meetings, we'll always try to keep the 2nd half of our meetings for general round table discussions.

Again, no meeting in December as it's too close to Christmas. See you in January!