Naamloos

SCOM – HTML Report: Certificate Expiration

Hi,

Today I want to give an answer to the question I often get at customers: “We want an overview of all certificates in our environment (on Windows Servers) that are expiring within X amount of days”.

This approach is based on this management pack: http://www.systemcentercentral.com/pack-catalog/pki-certificate-verification-mp/

The management pack discovers certificates on all servers (in…

SCOM – Quick Tip: Exchange Queue Length Monitor

Hi,

I’m currently busy at several customers setting up SCOM infrastructures. At one of those customers there were complaints by users that email messages were queued. When looking at the queues on the exchange servers they were actually HUGE.

Due to the fact Exchange was already monitored in SCOM I thought we would have seen this but that was not the case. In the Exchange Management pack there is

Visualize Windows Update info (from SCCM) in SCOM / Squared Up

Hi,

Today I want to show you guys a nice example of how we can use custom scripts to visualise data coming from SCCM in Squared Up dashboards on top of a SCOM platform. And provide a strong integration between SCCM, SCOM & Squared Up.

Squared Up is my favorite tool to create dashboards, check it out here: https://demo.squaredup.com 

I’m currently in the process of setting up a brand new SCOM 1801…

Hello, Today I would like to demonstrate a real life example on how to use Microsoft Power BI. Setting the scene : We are currently deploying the Windows 10 platform in a large environment, we have allready performed a swap of approx 6000 devices and are now starting the refresh on existing devices that are capable of running Windows 10. In order to do so we rely on our network or Champions.…

Hello, Happy new year and best wishes to all for 2018 ! Unfortunately today on “verloren maandag” real life kicks in. So I wanted to share how to monitor running runbooks on orchestrator using scom. Now we are not going to use the web interface as it could be that this specific component is down but the runbook server is still fully operational. So instead we will be using a sql query to check if…

Hardware Inventory after SCCM OSD Task Sequence

Hi, I like using a lot of custom collections based on data from Hardware Inventory: Operating System Version, Hardware Manufacturer, Hardware Model, etc. However to make sure the properties are available the Hardware Inventory needs to run at least once, using this information you will be able to start the hardware inventory right after the OSD task sequence completes. We will be using the Task…

Hello, Christmas and New year is a great time, we all recieve gifts and make lots of promises for the new year that has arrived. So I recieved a Elite X 3 for testing and promised myself to really focus on nwow in 2017. This means limit travel as much as possible,replace face to face meetings with technology if the situation allows it and follow a schedule that “works” meaning professional…

Quick Tip ! Bitlocker Pin screen gone !

  Hello, We recently used a partners’ deployment services in order to prestage approximately 5000 laptops for a windows 10 deployment. Today we recieved our first shipment from the factory and we started one in full confidence. After all the image had been validated on site, everything worked there except for our part 2 sccm task sequence that we use to finish up some minor issues and enable…

SCCM – Deploy Unknown Computers with Assettag as computername

Hi, In a recent Windows 10 deployment project (with SCCM) a customer of mine wanted to use the Serialnumber as the computername within Active Directory. The customer is using Unknown Computersso they don’t the need to import them first. Also there was the need to identify if a computer was a desktop or laptop, this was needed to make sure the computer was joined in the right OU depending of that…

Hello, We discovered in one of our customer environments that there was a long delay at computer startup time with Windows 10 build 1607. Now we had an acceptance environment where the issue did not occur, only difference was that DA was enabled at production site and not at the acceptance environment. So we activated verbose messaging using : Computer -> Admin Templates -> System … This revealed…

  Hello, Today we’ll run a RMS scenario in our demo office 365 environment. RMS provides the ability to restrict certain actions to documents ( office and other ) depending on the authenticating user by encrypting the required files. This way you can share confidential data in an easy way and make sure only the allowed persons can perform some actions with the documents. You can find a clear…

Windows 10 Enterprise IE11

  Hello, Windows 10 is great but there are some annoyances in an enterprise environment discovered. For example we deploy the Windows 10 to an environment where IE11 is the standard browser so we don’t want to confuse the user with the default edge icon. You know this one We can set the default browser and file type associations on a reference machine and export them by using dism /online And we…

Endurance test Revolve 810

  Hello, Looking back I was very enthusiastic when I first recieved my HP Elitebook Revolve 810 ( 1st generation ). This was way back in 2013 and a number ( read a lot ) of similar devices have been rolling into the market since then. But let’s have a look at how the revolve looks now after over 3 years of intense use. And I mean intense as the device travels with me each day to a customer site…

Hello, Quid Pro Quo …or in the words of Austin Powers : Squid Pro Quo, meaning “a feavour for a feavour”. From the corporate ICT’s perspectieve this translates to : we provide additional services that you can use whenever, wherever but … We need to have some information about the location and device before we do that. Sounds good … Let’s take a popular cloud service like mail/calendar or cloud…

Hello, Since the beginning of the computer era , endusers require support, preferably on site with some coffee and chocolates to go. But reality is remote using some kind of tool that allows remote control. Windows 8 and above lack that functionality with windows intune, not the fault of Intune but something proper to the OSE itself. Now we can integrate cloud service 1 ( Intune ) with cloud…

Add URL to customized Windows 10 Start Menu

Hi, Since more and more of our customers are adopting Windows 10 in their environment we start to learn more tricks every day. An important component of Windows 10 is the start menu. Administrators could apply a default startmenu layout for all users by using a GPO but downside of this approach is that the user isn’t able to add any custom applications himself. That’s why I prefer to set the…

Hello, Empowerment of users is always great, we all want to be able to do some required actions when we want to, instead of logging requests and waiting for the actions to occur. The Microsoft EMS is a combined set of cloud services wrapped up in one license formule. More info can be found here : https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/cloud-platform/enterprise-mobility. But today we focus on the olympic…