February 3 2012

Outlook profile settings ignored in Office 2010 SP1 using OCT

I was using the Office Customization Wizard to deploy a MST file for Office 2010 – pretty staight forward – it had some settings in there for for creating Outlook user profiles. It was working without problem. Then I added the Office 2010 Service Pack 1 MSP files to the Upgrade folder (slipstreaming). After this, the Outlook profile settings were no longer applied when a new install was done – whether they were defined setting in the OCT GUI or whether it was a PRF. It turns out that this is a known bug in Service Pack 1 for Office 2010 – see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2590591. My solution was to use the ‘Automatically configure profile based on Active Directory Primary SMTP address’ setting and leave the Outlook profile setting section blank.
 
 



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Category: SMS / SCCM, Tools | LEAVE A COMMENT
January 5 2012

SCCM Task Sequence Monitor

This is a great tool for automatically backing up SCCM task sequences. It basically monitors task sequences and will back them up whenever anyone attempts to change one. It’s very good for version / change control when there are potentially multiple people working on task sequences.

I have implemented this before but can never find the URL for it when I want it, so here it is for all to see:

http://mdtcustomizations.codeplex.com/releases/view/65824

 

Category: SMS / SCCM, Tools | LEAVE A COMMENT
December 10 2011

Running program in SYSTEM context

This is an old trick, one that I have been using for many years, but I’ve never documented it. Often when working with SCCM, you will need to test how something will operate when running in the SYSTEM context (as opposed USER context) – scripts, exes, msis, lots of things. I’ve used the trick with PSEXEC, where you just run ‘psexec.exe -i -s cmd.exe’ and you are presented with a command prompt running in the SYSTEM context – from here you can run your test commands. There is a good writeup about it over here – http://verbalprocessor.com/2007/12/05/running-a-cmd-prompt-as-local-system/ if you need any further information.
 
 

Category: Scripting, SMS / SCCM, Tools, Windows | LEAVE A COMMENT
December 9 2011

Microsoft Certificate Expiration Alerting tool

I came across this very useful free tool for alerting when a certificate that has been issued by an internal Microsoft Certificate Authority is going to expire (SCOM can do this too but this is a good alernative). In the words of the developer:

The Certificate Expiration Alerter helps IT departments monitor the expiration status of all their certificates which are issued from an internal Windows Server Certificate Authority (CA). When a certificate is about to expire, the Certificate Expiration Alerter sends a notification email with information about the certificate. This allows IT administrator to be proactive and take action by renewing the certificates before they expire and prevent possible service downtimes.

For more info, see these 2 websites – http://blogs.technet.com/b/nexthop/archive/2011/11/18/certificate-expiration-alerting.aspx and http://sourceforge.net/projects/certexpalerter.
 
 

Category: Certificates, Tools | LEAVE A COMMENT
October 17 2011

Microsoft System Center ROI tool

I came across an interesting and free tool. In their own words, this tool Quickly Generate Credible, Personalized ROI presentations and Proposals for System Center. The System Center ROI/TCO tool enables a comprehensive business case for the entire System Center suite including:

System Center Operations Manager
System Center Configuration Manager
System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM)
System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM)
Opalis
System Center Service Manager

This generates a pretty good starting point for a business case for any of the System Center products and the output includes predefined Word and Powerpoint documents.

See here for more info – https://roianalyst.alinean.com/microsoft/system_center/launch.htm

 
 

Category: SMS / SCCM, Tools | LEAVE A COMMENT
September 5 2011

Tool for pinging multiple hosts

I came across a great tool called Ping Them, great for pinging multiple hosts. See http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/doli/archive/2011/08/17/free-tool-ping-them.aspx for more details.

This is similar to a Powershell script of mine over here – http://blog.danovich.com.au/2009/06/10/nifty-powershell-script-to-ping-multiple-servers/ – but this new tool adds a great GUI and some additional functionality.
 
 

Category: Powershell, Scripting, Tools | LEAVE A COMMENT