Written by Fred Bainbridge.

May 2015 - Meeting Notes

May 11th @ the MTC. Presenters - Wally Mead, Secunia (Sherry Kissinger) and Matthew Teegarden.

4 MVPs were in attendance. Wally, Brian, Sherry and Nash. There is was a PowerShell challenge at the bottom. Figure it out and I will buy you a beer. *I owe Joe Kaster a beer.

Wally Mead AM session-

SP2 - what's the deal? - One set of binaries to download for 2012 SP1 / 2012 R2. This cannot be applied to 2012 RTM.

You don't get the R2 features when you install this SP to a 2012 SP1 environment.

The CU numbering will start over after the SP release.

The SP2 download is available either the 14th or 15th of May.

Why release CU5 and then a week later, release the service pack? Customers are faster to adopt a CU and not so fast with a service pack. Your site is down a little longer with a service pack. Client upgrades are easier with a CU as well.

Better testing from the product group for SPs than CUs.

When the SP was released to MVP, it was not able to be used as an upgrade and it was time bombed at 30 days. This is different than previous releases.

Main reasons to upgrade - Windows 10 support. Integrated Intune. 600,000 clients supported now. Native support for SQL 2014.

The ADK does not need to change with the SP update.

Not many PowerShell updates in SP2

OSD Updates - some intelligence built in to help mitigate some risk.

You cannot deploy to any default collections.
You can configure automatically hide collection from deployment if they hit certain thresholds (more than X number of members)
Block deployments to ConfigMgr site systems. (you can change that to a warning) If the membership changes after the fact, this will not block the deployment. Be careful. This does not happen if you create the collection / deployment with scripting.

CU5 - You don't have to deploy CU5 to get to SP1/SP2. If you have more than 10,000 packages, CU5 should be applied. It will help with future updates.

Do you recommend applying a CU even if it doesn't apply anything specific to you? MS suggests only to apply if you need to. However, MVPs and other product groups suggest otherwise. MS eventually relented and said to apply them as they come out. It is rather hotly debated about whether you should apply them as they are released or not. It is not a requirement by Microsoft to apply the CUs.

The product group has finite resources for testing. Just keep it in mind.

They use the 80/20 rule.

Clients Management -

How to repair a client? Running ccmexec.msi doesn't get the updated client. Then what? Make sure the management points have the latest clients present on the MPs so that repairs get the updated codes. New clients should get the updated client from software updates deployments, etc.

Using the hotfix folder during the client install is not supported. It happens everywhere, but its not supported.

2007 environments will be allowed to manage windows 10 devices, no OSD though.

Windows Updates (Microsoft Updates) - given the new model of constantly updating software the value of WSUS comes into question.

vNext - In site properties you can manage the collection size limits for OSD.

Audit status messages exist in case anyone overrides the safety controls.

Drivers -

searching updated / filtering possible
will get a warning if adding wrong architecture drivers to a boot image
warning for adding non critical drivers to a boot media,

Task Sequence resiliency - i.e. able to handle KB with multiple reboots.

SMSTS.log is bigger now during OSD.

Some bugs in supercedence has been fixed up a bit.

App-V will not deploy much faster in non-persistent VDI. (on par with App-V standalone infrastructure)

Unified portal for end user experience. Software center and application portal are combined.

Full azure support

On Premise model device manager

Matthew Teegarden

Ignite review - lots of getting yelled at by staff. The food was disgusting. The sessions that were labeled 300/400 level were probably really 100 level. Everything from ignite is on channel 9 at the moment.

use feedly to aggregate your data.

the site servicing plug in gives a little mini feedly directly into the configmgr console.

The build in ConfigMgr indexer is called "rebuildIndexes" - this doesn't work and should be disabled.

How does this compare with the built in maintenance plans? The build in maintenance tasks are a little heavy.

PowerShell Challenge (SOLVED) Joe Kaster is the man.

There was some discussion about how to modify OS requirements for application deployment types in configmgr. I stated that this was possible you just needed to use WMI directly as opposed to the PowerShell cmdlets. So I spent the entire afternoon trying to make this work. Hence the limited notes after Wally's AM session. Anyway, I wasn't able to get this working... to anyone who can, I will buy you a beer.

$siteCode = "ABC";

$siteServer = "siteserver.domain.local"

$appName = "[DisplayName of Your Application]"

import-module 'C:\Program Files (x86)\ConfigMgrConsole\bin\ConfigurationManager.psd1' -force  #make this work for you

if ((get-psdrive $sitecode -erroraction SilentlyContinue | measure).Count -ne 1) {

    new-psdrive -Name $SiteCode -PSProvider "AdminUI.PS.Provider\CMSite" -Root $SiteServer

}

set-location $sitecode`:

$Appdt = Get-CMApplication -Name $appName 

$xml = [Microsoft.ConfigurationManagement.ApplicationManagement.Serialization.SccmSerializer]::DeserializeFromString($appdt.SDMPackageXML,$True) 

$xml.DeploymentTypes.Requirements.Expression.Operands.Add("Windows/All_x86_Windows_8.1_Client") 

$xml.DeploymentTypes.Requirements.Name = $xml.DeploymentTypes.Requirements.Name + ", All Windows 8.1 (32-bit)" 

$UpdatedXML = [Microsoft.ConfigurationManagement.ApplicationManagement.Serialization.SccmSerializer]::SerializeToString($XML, $True) 

$appdt.SDMPackageXML = $UpdatedXML 

Set-CMApplication -InputObject $appDT

Wally's slidedeck here. And Cireson Remote Manage here. Cireson Asset Management here.

Created on 12 May 2015.