I just got the alert that one of my session proposals for MMS 2012 was approved! My session will be titled “Case Study: Hierarchy Simplification With ConfigMgr 2012″.
Session Abstract:
One company, 15000 systems, 70 locations…and 23 Primary Sites in ConfigMgr 2007. This may be the poster child for hierarchy simplification with ConfigMgr 2012. Working with ConfigMgr 2012 RC1, we were able to plan the architecture redesign to simplify this down to a single primary site while expanding the ability to safely delegate management across multiple business units. This case study digs into the decision process that took place through the architecture and management redesign process.
This is a message for anyone going to MMS 2011 in Las Vegas who would be interested in coming to a morning Bible study/prayer time. This will be the fourth year running that a group of us have met before breakfast on Tuesday through Friday mornings at the event. The group has varied from year to year based on who was able to come to MMS, but we’ve had a good turnout and some good connection time every year. I’m looking forward to reconnecting with some of the “regulars” as well as meeting some new folks.
This year I will be leading the study time again and will be taking us on a brief tour of the book of Romans. My current plan is for the first day to be a high level overview of the book and the other three days to specifically look at Romans 12. I’m early in the prep though, so that could change!
If you would like more info on the study, please email me to let me know. Same as every year, I won’t be posting location on the blog to protect the privacy of whoever is hosting the study…I will be emailing specific location information to those who email me.
Looking forward to seeing you there. Two weeks and counting!!!
This announcement is a bit late this year because I wasn’t sure that I was going to be able to come to MMS. I got the clearance to go last week, so I’ll see you in Vegas!
For the third year running we will be having a morning Bible Study/Prayer time. Details are still being nailed down, but plan on meeting with a group of us to get the day started on the right note. This year I have asked a very good friend of mine (Tim Benjamin) to lead the sessions.
If you are interested in coming, please use my Contact Form to send me a note. I’ll email specific location and times to those who are interested (I won’t be posting the specific room number on my blog in order to protect the privacy of whoever is hosting it.)
Okay…it has been entirely too long since I’ve posted…over two months. Life has been a little crazy, but I finally cleaned up the rest of the Rod Trent interview to prepare it for posting. Hope you enjoy it. Also…I expect to post the next interview within another week or so…it is with Tim Mintner of the Microsoft Deployment product team!
As I promised last week, here is the first of a two part interview with Rod Trent that took place the last night of MMS 2009. I hope to post part 2 sometime next week. Enjoy!
I am currently in the shuttle headed to the airport after a long week at TechEd. Over the course of the week I was able to get a few more interviews done that I will be posting over the next month or so. I still have the Rod Trent interview from MMS queued up. Last night I got to spend some extended time with Tim Mintner and Michael Niehaus. As we were leaving the closing “party” last night, I got to sit down with Tim for an interview. This morning I was able to interview Mikael Nystrom and Johan Arwidmark before leaving the convention center. Stay tuned for some very entertaining interviews. In light of the amount of traffic the Sherry Kissinger post produced, there is obviously a lot of interest in the personal side of these technology people.
While preparing for MMS and TechEd, I needed to record the demo that I would use in my session. This was a requirement for TechEd, and I ended up using the recorded demo instead of doing a live demo…partially because it is very difficult to perform a live demo of Operating System Deployment in the 75 minute time frame of the sessions at MMS/TechEd. It also allows me to show the entire OS Build and Capture process (about a three and a half hour process in my virtual demo environment)…I am able to speed up the video of that process to show it all in about 3 minutes. Overall a much better process.
Knowing that I needed to be able to record my screen for the demo I knew that there were a few options. One is LiveMeeting and/or WebEx. I don’t have access to either one, so I looked elsewhere. I learned about Camtasia Studio by TechSmith. They offer a fully functional 30 day trial of the software. Using that I was able to not only capture the screen while the demo was running, but was able to speed up sections, slow down other sections to allow me time to talk to it, and splice together two portions of the demo (server side and client side) into one video to use during the demo. Very nice piece of software. I was also able to use it to produce the ConfigMgr Child Labor video. It allowed me to pull in my raw video segments, have a separate narration track, add in opening and closing title tracks, as well as add the video from MMS 2008 in as a Picture-in-Picture.
Overall I was VERY impressed with the software. However…it’s not cheap. With as often as I would use it, there was no way that I could justify the $299 price tag. If I did more demos…it would pay for itself quickly. For the once a year or so that I would use it…not so much.
Well…tonight at TechEd there was an opening night reception in the Expo hall. Lots of companies. As I was wandering around, I saw that TechSmith had a booth, so I walked over to see if they were going to have a drawing for a copy of Camtasia…which they are. As I was talking to the lady at the booth I was telling her about what I had done with the software and that I loved it but couldn’t justify the expense. Heck I’ve been telling a lot of people over the course of the last month about the software. She then proceeded to pull over another lady named Betsy whose title is “Chief Evangelist” for TechSmith. After telling her what I had done, she pulls out a business card to give to me. On the back of the card was a sticker with license keys for Camtasia Studio and Snagit. SWEET!!! My 30 day trial expired yesterday…I get to keep using it!
Rod Trent put up a post this week about the possibility of MMS being merged into TechEd. In my opinion this would be disastrous. Merging what is hands down the best event Microsoft sponsors into an already too big and too broad event would simply destroy all that is good about MMS. As part of Rod’s post he includes a poll so that we can let our voices be heard about this possibility. Please, visit Rod’s post and continue on to the poll.
Today I have been downloading and listening to various MMS sessions that I missed while at the event. Normally I have my schedule double booked (or even some time slots triple or quad booked). Combine that with the fatigue that sets in after the second day…there are a lot of really valuable sessions that I’m simply unable to make it to during the week.
One of the sessions I missed at MMS but listened to this morning was “SC15 – Windows Client: Roadmap and Introduction to Windows 7 for Enterprise Customers” by Jeremy Chapman. During his session he performed a demo of a Windows 7 feature called the “Problem Steps Recorder”. What this program allows you (or one of your users) to do is record what happened in the event of a “problem” on their system. You start the PSR, then recreate the problem that you were experiencing. It essentially takes screenshots as you are going through the process and spits out a zip file that has an MHTML file in it complete with screenshots and detailed steps of what the user was doing at each step along the way.
This will prove to be very useful. Back when I worked the help desk I can’t tell you the number of times (and honestly don’t want to remember the number of times) that I tried to get a user to accurately describe what they were doing when a problem came up. Sometimes it was a legit problem…sometimes it was a PEBKAC issue. This feature would have saved me huge amounts of time in figuring out what was actually happening.
The presenter mentioned that this app can be launched either manually by the user or…and I like this…you can build it into the application so that it launches automatically when the app fails and ask the user to recreate the problem.
Last week at MMS in Las Vegas, Microsoft announced the general timeline for next versions of products in the System Center suite. For those who were not able to come to MMS, here is the slide from the second keynote laying out that roadmap.
During my session at MMS (and upcoming at TechEd) I used a Front End HTA and a back end VBS during my deployment demo. I mentioned that I would make them available for download (and have gotten multiple requests for this). Hope these help someone else out there!
One of the aspects that I have seen in the Systems Management community is that it really is a close knit group that is spread all over the globe. I have also seen a bit of a hunger from people that I have interacted with to know what some of the “big names” are really like. The way I have been phrasing it lately is that people would love to get to know “the personal side behind the technology face.”
Last year when TechEd was in Orlando (and I was living in Orlando) I had the opportunity to spend an afternoon with Wally Mead. At the end of that afternoon Wally allowed me to interview him…not a technology interview…we barely touched on anything related to ConfigMgr. I got lots of comments both on the blog and personally from people who enjoyed getting to know a bit more about Wally. My plan at the time was to do several more interviews, but for various reasons I haven’t been able to pull it off…until last week.
Last week at MMS I sat down and interviewed two ConfigMgr MVPs that I have gotten to know over the last few years. Soon I will be posting my interviews with Sherry Kissinger and Rod Trent. I have a bit of editing to do on the original audio…killing dead air between questions as well as extraneous noise that popped up at different times. I don’t know if I will be able to get it done before heading to TechEd, but I will be posting them soon…check back. I should be able to get the first one going in the next week or so…maybe the flight to LA for TechEd.
In a conversation with Garth Jones last week at MMS I mentioned that if I had time I was going to put together a blooper video from the various snippets that I shot for the ConfigMgr Child Labor video. I think I had somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 “takes” during the filming. Garth mentioned that conversation on his blog yesterday, so I guess I need to follow through on that idea! I’ll try to throw something together this week before heading to TechEd next week.
Just finished my MMS session a while ago. Had a really fun time with it and felt like it went really well. Had a good time interacting with some of the attendees both before and after the session. In the session I promised a list of links that I referred to during the time. Some are on my blog, some are elsewhere.
By request, I will be posting the task sequence demo videos later…I want to do a voice over of the videos to make them more valuable. I will also be posting my Front End HTA and Back End VBS script later. I will update my post after doing so.
I think all of the links that I referred to that are on my blog are also on the My Favorite Ramblings page, so I will just link to that one. This includes the “Run a CMD Prompt as System” post that I referred to. Just scroll down past the personal section to the “ConfigMgr” section.
This is the follow up to the video that was shown at MMS 2008 showing my five year old daughter deploying systems using ConfigMgr. I used this during the intro to my “Operating System Deployment in the Real World” session at MMS 2009.
Last year at MMS I had a touch with fame when Bill Anderson used a video (during the “State of the Nation” address) of me and my five year old daughter doing Operating System Deployment with ConfigMgr. It was shocking to me how much face recognition that video gave me last year.
Well…I am presenting at MMS this year on “Operating System Deployment in the Real World." If you are at MMS, that session is Wednesday at 2:15 in Bellini 2001B. During that session I will be debuting a follow up video to the one shown last year. If you want to see it, don’t be late. I will also be posting the video here after the session.
Wanted to put out a final reminder…if you are interested in coming to the 2nd Annual MMS Bible Study, let me know ASAP. We will be meeting in Rod Trent’s room again this year. I will be sending location info via an email to anyone interested, but I will not be posting that to my blog…to protect Rod. Either email me directly or use my contact form. The Bible study will be Tuesday through Friday mornings before breakfast…probably 7:00-7:30am.
Last year before MMS, I put out a call to see if anyone was interested in doing a Bible study during the week of MMS. I got a lot of very positive response, and so last year a group of us met in the morning before breakfast and spent some time studying the book of Philemon before the day started. Rod and Megan Trent volunteered to let us use their room to host the study. Around Thursday of that week, someone in the group mentioned that being the “1st Annual MMS Bible Study”.
So…who’s ready for the “2nd Annual” study? We are going to change the format up a bit this year. We’ll probably spend a bit more time in praise and worship than we did last year. Also…last year I intentionally chose a book of the Bible that people were likely to be unfamiliar with…this year we will be looking at a book that people are more likely to have read…Philippians. Specifically we will be looking at what that letter has to say about the way we treat those around us. I also plan to do a similar Bible Study at TechEd in LA this year.
So…who’s interested? If you are, please either send me an email or use this blog’s contact form. Let me know which of the two (MMS, TechEd or both) that you are interested in.
I’ve been setting up a virtual ConfigMgr environment on my laptop to use both for demonstrating at client locations as well as to use for the demo portions of my presentations at MMS and TechEd. It’s running inside Virtual PC 2007, and the server VM is running Windows Server 2008 and ConfigMgr 2007 SP1 R2. It actually runs pretty peppy…I do have the VM running on an external 7200 RPM hard drive connected to my laptop via an eSATA cable.
Anyway…I set up a Task Sequence to do my OS build and capture. It worked fine. Then I imported that WIM file and set up another Task Sequence to deploy that image. It was advertised to both the “All Unknown Computers” collection as well as a special OSD Deploy collection that I had created and imported the name and MAC address of the new VM into.
After booting the new VM with the Bootable Task Sequence media CD, it kept giving me this error message: “Failed to Run Task Sequence” “There are no task sequences available for this computer.” If I looked in the smsts.log file located at “X:\windows\temp\smsts”, I saw an error entry stating: “No assigned task sequence.” Looking through the log file, I could see that it was reading the correct MAC address and had the right SMS GUID that was assigned to the system that I imported. So it was clearly recognizing the machine. It was talking to ConfigMgr correctly. It was downloading policy, but it was determining that none of those policies were applicable. If I looked at the properties of either the Collection or the system, it showed that the advertisement for the Task Sequence was applicable to that computer. So…why would it show as applicable in the GUI, but not be evaluated as applicable during the task sequence?
After beating on this for entirely too long, I finally figured it out this afternoon. I had done a housekeeping task on my VM to move all of the default “All…” collections off of the root of the Collections node (see this post). After doing so, I had forgotten to update those collections after “moving” them. Shouldn’t matter…except that the “All Unknown Computers” collection was completely empty…including not having the “x86 Unknown Computer (x86 Unknown Computer)” or “x64 Unknown Computer (x64 Unknown Computer)” entries.
When the new VM was evaluating policy, it went through the following steps in the SMSTS.log.
Client Identity: GUID:24e41bb6-2d68-451a-9802-29f9f1bdd1ea Netbios name: NewComputer Client GUID = GUID:24e41bb6-2d68-451a-9802-29f9f1bdd1ea, Netbios name = NewComputer, State = Unknown Client is unprovisioned Using unknown machine GUID: 1b554c94-8eeb-490a-8b10-ae10bd579d3d Unknown client identity: GUID:24e41bb6-2d68-451a-9802-29f9f1bdd1ea Preparing Policy Assignment Request. Setting transport. Setting site code = CM1. Setting client ID = 1b554c94-8eeb-490a-8b10-ae10bd579d3d. Executing Policy Assignment Request.
Note what happens to the GUID. It starts off with the GUID that starts with “24e41…” and a state of “Unknown”. It then switches the GUID that it is going to use for the rest of the process to the “unknown machine GUID” which on my system starts with “1b554…”…this is the GUID for the “x86 Unknown Computer (x86 Unknown Computer)” resource that should be in the “All Unknown Computers” collection. After switching the GUID, you see the last line that I pasted in above where it is “Executing Policy Assignment Request.”
Because I had not updated the collection…and the “x86 Unknown Computer (x86 Unknown Computer)” resource didn’t exist in any collection…there wasn’t any advertisement that was applicable to that GUID. It behaved exactly like it should have. It just took me a long long time to figure out why it was failing. Once I updated the collection, the “problem” went away.
In this instance, it was definitely a PEBKAC issue…Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair.
