Eswar Koneti's Blog

Configuration Manager 2007 gives you an option to create New folder (kind of Custom reports folder ) with New Category to create your Own reports what you required But in Configuration Manager 2012,i don’t see way to create New folder to create all the custom reports for your reference.

Creation of Custom folder is not available in configuration Manager 2012 ,the only option left out is to go with Category .

How do you create New Citatory ? If you right click on reports node from Configuration Console,you don’t get such option to create one.

You will have to go with web reports with enough rights to create it.

Open IE with SSRS report manager website : http://SCCMServername/reports

Click on the Report Folder (Configmgr_Sitecode)

Click on New Folder which is actually a Category to create reports underneath.

give A Name what you would like with some Description and click ok

the custom category what we created You see it below :

Now open the Console and go to monitoring node—>reporting–>reports

Now we can create our Custom reports in Custom Folder But how ? you don’t get an option to create new report under Custom Category.

Right click on reports node and select Create Report

Enter the right name for the report and then select the path where you want to store the report under ?

Once you are finished with the report,you will be prompted with Report Builder to enter the SQL query and more customizations.

Hope it Helps!

Justin Gao Documented how to deploy Win 8 Using SCCM 2012 SP1 Beta as System Center 2012 Configuration Manager SP1 beta Supports now.

In this post , Justin documented how to use System Center 2012 Configuration Manager(SCCM 2012) SP1 Beta to deployment Windows 8 .

    Including these parts:

• Configuring a Distribution Point to Support PXE
• Capturing a Reference Computer
• Preparing the Site to Support Operating System Deployment
• Deploying an Operating System Image to a Bare Metal Client
• Installing the Operating System Image on a Bare Metal System

Complete post and download PDF document step by step,available here

P.S:Please use Adobe Reader X or above version to open !

Via http://blogs.technet.com/b/justin_gao/archive/2012/10/07/how-to-use-system-center-2012-configuration-manager-sp1-beta-to-deploy-windows-8.aspx

SCCM 2012 is now configured up to 20 Site roles which you can install/Configure on single machine or distribute to different machines for load balancing .

• Site server
• Site Database Server
• Site system
• Application Catalog Web Service Point
• Application Catalog Website Point
• Asset Intelligence Synchronization Point
• Component server
• Distribution Point
• Endpoint protection Point
• Enrollment Point
• Enrollment Proxy Point
• Fallback status Point
• Management Point
• Mobile Device Management Point
• Out of band service Point
• Reporting services Point
• software update point
• State Migration Point
• System health Validator Point

Our engineering team has had an amazing journey this past year with two key releases to help our customers improve their capabilities for deploying Windows in their enterprises.   As you know, we released Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2012 in April of this year to coincide with the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) and this enabled a lot of functionality asked for by you.  These are outlined in this post I made back around this release and include an all-new extensible wizard, all-new rebuilt designer, and support for all the enterprise deployment scenarios.

On the heels of the 2012 release, our team was quickly focused on enabling the UDI scenario forWindows 8 & 2012 which were soon-to-be-released.  The final “gold” bits were announced for Windows 8 & Windows Server 2012, and with that, I’m super proud that we have released MDT 2012 Update 1 which enables all the key features and support needed to deploy Windows 8 & 2012 with MDT UDI.

In today’s post, I want to make you aware of the key additional features & support added in this release for UDI.  In today’s post, I will not drill-down into the features and will save this for later more in-depth posts but I want you to start playing with them now.

Introducing USMT for Windows 8 Support

The major testing that our team had to do across the various refresh & replace scenarios was focusing on ensuring that we could effectively capture and restore your user’s data.  In Windows 8, a new version of User State Migration Tool (USMT) was released and as part of Update 1 we’ve validated that all UDI-based scenarios using this new USMT is supported.

Read complete post on http://blogs.technet.com/b/chrad/archive/2012/08/21/introducing-user-driven-install-udi-for-mdt-2012-update-1.aspx

This post is going to be a something new today to publish Custom Office templates made available to all users when they open PowerPoint or Word or Excel Office applications.

This can be done several ways like AD group policy management or Scripting or other ways But I would prefer to do it using Configuration Manager.

After end of the session,You should create and deploy these Office 2010 templates for users with Microsoft Word 2010, PowerPoint 2010, and Excel 2010.

Here is what the requirement is and available to all end users when the user go for New file.

The Whole procedure involves

Creation of custom templates

creation of thumbnails and preview files

Creation of XML configuration file that describes the custom template, thumbnail, and preview files

Creation of registry key that enables Office to read the XML configuration file

Create your templates :

Step 1: Create Custom template (could be PowerPoint or Word or Excel etc) and save it as .dotx (for word) .potx (for PowerPoint) , .xltx (for Excel) on local Drive.

Create thumbnail and preview files (optional):

This is an optional step, but thumbnail and preview files can be very helpful to users because they enable users to quickly view and select templates. To see examples of thumbnail and preview files, click Sample Templates, on the Available Templates pane. If you decide not to create thumbnail and preview files for a custom template, users see the name of the template in the Available Templates pane.

Create an XML configuration file that describes the custom template, thumbnail, and preview files :

To display your custom templates in the Available Templates pane, you must create an XML configuration file. Office 2010 references this file to determine how to locate and display your template, thumbnail, and preview files.

Use the below sample xml code and save it as .xml (name ESKONR_Template.xml)

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<o:featuredcontent lcid="1033" xmlns:o="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office">

    <o:application id="PP">
        <o:featuredtemplates startdate="2011-03-01" enddate="2041-03-01">

            <!– TEMPLATE 1 –>
            <o:featuredtemplate title="ESKONR" source="C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Templates\ESKONR\ESKONR_Template_2012.pot" >

        </o:featuredtemplate>
        </o:featuredtemplates>
    </o:application>
</o:featuredcontent>

Changes you need to edit : Title: which is title name users will see it when they click New .

Source: Location for custom templates for PowerPoint,Excel or Word

filename : for Thumbnail preview if you don’t have ,remove the 2 lines (media and preview filename).

If you have multiple templates let say for word 2 ,Excel 2 ,you will have to create 4 templates one for each representing template name.

Once you are done with creating XML file,save it to location where templates are stored.

Create registry key that enables Office to read the XML configuration file:

Open the notepad and paste it ,save it as filename.reg

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Common\Spotlight\Providers\ESKONR]
"LastUpdateTimestamp"=hex:dd,ab,b8,4f,00,00,00,00
"ServiceURL"="C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Office\\Templates\\ESKONR\\ESKONR_Template.xml"

Edit the reg key that matches with your Title and XML file names(bold letters need changes).

With this,we have got all our prerequisites files in hand.

Now we have got Templates,XML file and Registry Key .With this,we need to deploy all these pieces using Configuration Manager by copying the templates to User local drive folder.

We will achieve this using Simple Batch script using command Xcopy.

Open the notepad and paste the script which copies templates,XML files into user machines folder and run the registry at the end.

@ Echo off
REM Copy templates and registry files
REM Written by eswar koneti

mkdir "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Templates\ESKONR"

Xcopy "%~dp0ESKONR_Template_2012.pot" "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Templates\ESKONR" /Y
Xcopy "%~dp0ESKONR_Template.xml" "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Templates\ESKONR" /Y

Xcopy "%~dp0Templates.reg" "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Templates\ESKONR" /Y

reg import "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Templates\ESKONR\Templates.reg" /Y

Create a package in SCCM using above batch file as command line and run the script using administrative rights and for each user who ever logs in so that it will be applicable to all users irrespective of computer.

Hope it helps!

Update :

What if there is new version of the content to be replaced on end user machines ?

To make this work,you will have to change the path of the existing template used in the above process .

Below is the registry location which you will have to identify and update accordingly.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Common\Spotlight\Content\ESKONR\PP1033\FeaturedTemplates\1\1

Creating collection to get computers that starts and end with particular string is used mostly using % .If this percentile used at the end of the variable name, you get all computer names that starts from particular string and if you use this in the beginning, gets all computers that ends with particular string.

Examples : To get all computer names that starts with ESKONR, use ESKONR% , to get all computer name that ends with ESKONR ,use %ESKONR.

But what if  need all computer name that has letters like ESK in the middle of the computer name. Let says i have computers with 15 digits and they have ES placed in 10-11 . Example : INHYD1202ES0003

We can use underscore as wildcard for one character space and use them along with Like statement and apply to fields.

Collection :

select SMS_R_SYSTEM.ResourceID,SMS_R_SYSTEM.ResourceType,SMS_R_SYSTEM.Name,SMS_R_SYSTEM.SMSUniqueIdentifier,SMS_R_SYSTEM.ResourceDomainORWorkgroup,
SMS_R_SYSTEM.Client from SMS_R_System where SMS_R_System.Name like "__________ES___" and SMS_R_System.ResourceDomainORWorkgroup = "ESKONR"

We have used 9 underscores in our query before E and 4 Underscores after S to tell that first 9 digits can be any thing and last 4 digits can be anything .

Underscores (_) as wildcard can be used at any location in the query but one can replace one character only.

Hope it helps!

Full Details :http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/configmgrgeneral/thread/7b4d3810-a262-4c63-8dd6-7cc906b85941

select sys.name0,sys.AD_Site_Name0,FCM.SiteCode,ARP.DisplayName0,ARP.Version0,ARP.InstallDate0 from V_R_system sys
inner join v_Add_Remove_Programs ARP on arp.resourceID=sys.ResourceID
inner join v_FullCollectionMembership FCM on FCM.ResourceID=sys.ResourceID
and arp.DisplayName0 like ‘%project reader%’ and ARP.Version0 < ’4%’

For collection ,follow the post here on http://eskonr.com/2012/05/sccm-collection-computers-with-lower-version-application/

Full Details http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/configmgrgeneral/thread/7b4d3810-a262-4c63-8dd6-7cc906b85941

This collection is created using sub selected queries http://eskonr.com/2011/12/sccm-collection-sub-selected-quiries/

select SMS_R_System.ResourceId, SMS_R_System.ResourceType, SMS_R_System.Name, SMS_R_System.SMSUniqueIdentifier, SMS_R_System.ResourceDomainORWorkgroup, SMS_R_System.Client from  SMS_R_System inner join SMS_G_System_ADD_REMOVE_PROGRAMS on SMS_G_System_ADD_REMOVE_PROGRAMS.ResourceID = SMS_R_System.ResourceId where SMS_G_System_ADD_REMOVE_PROGRAMS.ResourceID not in (select SMS_R_SYSTEM.ResourceID from SMS_R_System inner join SMS_G_System_ADD_REMOVE_PROGRAMS on SMS_G_System_ADD_REMOVE_PROGRAMS.ResourceID = SMS_R_System.ResourceId inner join SMS_G_System_ADD_REMOVE_PROGRAMS_64 on SMS_G_System_ADD_REMOVE_PROGRAMS_64.ResourceId = SMS_R_System.ResourceId where (SMS_G_System_ADD_REMOVE_PROGRAMS.DisplayName like "%project reader%" or SMS_G_System_ADD_REMOVE_PROGRAMS_64.DisplayName like "%project reader%") and (SMS_G_System_ADD_REMOVE_PROGRAMS.Version > "4%" or SMS_G_System_ADD_REMOVE_PROGRAMS_64.Version > "4%"))

Project Description
The tool is designed for IT Professionals to troubleshoot SCCM/CM12 Client related Issues. The Client Center for Configuration Manager provides a quick and easy overview of client settings, including running services and Agent settings in a good easy to use, user interface.

This Tool is currently an alpha Version. For testing purposes only… !

Requirements

• Windows Remote Management (WinRM) must be enabled and configured on all target computers. (Run "winrm quickconfig" in a command prompt.)
• Microsoft .NET Framework 4 (on the computer running the Tool)
• Configuration Manager 2012 Agent on the target computer (some features will also work with SCCM2007)
• Admin rights on the target computer.
• Tested on Windows7 x64 and Server 2008 R2

Please read for more information about version,download link http://sccmclictr.codeplex.com/

To install it,click on clickonce link http://sccmclictr.codeplex.com/releases/clickonce/SCCMCliCtrWPF.application?localhost

If you have any wishes or ideas, please place your comment on the Project-Page

Thanks to Roger for nice client troubleshooting tool!

In System Center 2012 Configuration Manager, you can no longer deploy a secondary site server using Setup (wizard or scripted). Instead, you must use the Configuration Manager console to create a new secondary site. This is less than ideal if you want to deploy several secondary sites or want to automate the process for any other reason.
This project provides a script that will allow you to install a new System Center 2012 Configuration Manager secondary site server without using the Configuration Manager console. The script essentially performs the same actions as the Configuration Manager console, writing changes to the site control information through WMI.

The initial script is provided in VBScript, but I know one of our Configuration Manager MVP’s has been working on a Power Shell version that I hope we’ll be able to get added in the near future. The initial script is very basic, but should provide enough information to get you started and start some ideas flowing. I’ve already listed several To Do’s in the header of the script, but if you have other ideas, please let me know through the discussion.

Thanks to Jim Dempsey for developing this script !

Disclaimer:
Everything provided as part of this project is provided for informational purposes only. Microsoft and the project’s contributor(s) make no warranties, express or implied.

Download the script based tool Via http://cm12secsitescript.codeplex.com/

How to use the script,please refer http://blogs.technet.com/b/keithmayer/archive/2012/05/20/scripted-deployment-of-a-systemcenter-configuration-manager-2012-secondary-site-itcamp-sms.aspx