July 2014 MNSCUG Meeting Notes

Thanks to our VP Fred Bainbridge who took these excellent notes about the last meeting. Thanks to Concurrency for the great food!

Ryan Ephgrave - Right Click Tools

Using the right click tools you can right click on a user and go to user devices and it will show you how many devices the user has been on and for how long.

Update: Ryan has updated his blog to compliment some of what is written below. See it here.

You can get a listing of security groups per user as well. (this is nested). You can add and remove them from groups here as well. This feature makes Brian Mason like right click tools.

You can do this for machine accounts as well. (group membership)

Client Information -
System Information - gives lot of info on the device. You can configure what gets displayed (select columns)

You can install/uninstall applications from the RCT (this is the same behavior as the software center)
You can get boundary groups as well.

You can delete user profiles from the RCT (fully deletes it).

Revision history - you can see revision history from the RCT. In the future you will be able to see the differences between revisions.

See ephingadmin.com for a blog post about how to deploy a task sequence from the app catalog.

The collection ping is done by hostname, not IP. But in the future the tools will be able to choose between hostname and IP as to which to ping.

Newest tool can expire and or find superseded software updates.

There is a script from Ryan that creates all the GUIDS needed for a right click tool. It will create a context menu for everything that copies the GUID to the clipboard.

This is also outlined on ephingadmin.com

RCT parameters -
##SUB:[PROPERTYNAME]##, use quotes if think there will be a space (always use quotes).

You can use the script that creates right click tools to find the GUID that corresponds to a scoped collection. You can take that GUID and go to ConsoleRoot folder and then find the GUID in the appropriate XML and then find the next QUERY line... that will give you the WQL query that is used to populate the scoped collection.

AdminUI.ConsoleBuilder.exe -> you can use this to create consoles. This is probably what MS uses to create the console. Each click in the console created will resale the xml in ConsoleRoot folder.

Service Extensions were recently released. They are cool. They work for 2012 SP1 and above. It is available here.

IF you go to Ryan's blog and scroll all the way down you will see content outlining this presentation. The GUID generator script will be posted here as well.

Stephen Jesok - SCORCH Maintenance

The database is pretty straight forward, especially compared the Configmgr database.

SMA and SCORCH are very similar, SMA is all PowerShell based. Same concepts.

If you are not using SCORCH today would you implement it? Or would you use SMA? Orchestration can use C#, etch. SMA cannot. SMA only uses PowerShell.

If you are an IT pro you will lean towards SCORCH, if you are dev background you will lean towards SMA.