SCCM R2 Now Available

Well its official, yesterday R2 was released.
Here is the official link
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/configmgr/cc761485.aspx
to the site.

SQL Reporting Services
App-V Support
ForeFront client support
--and more


check it out. You must have Software Assurance in order to obtain it. Now it is just a matter of time before all the Software Vendors that supply it can get it to us.

SCCM Tools

Well I have decided to launch my own website / community. Bascially I will host a site where users can request SCCM tools, download SCCM tools, and have discussions about creating tools.

http://www.sccm-tools.com

Is the URL. I hope to have the site up in the next few weeks. This site will be a beta test so people can just go wild on the site to see what needs to be improved. Then I will delete everything and launch the site. Lets hope it goes well. It isn't easy to launch and IT site for IT people, we are very picky. I can't match myITforum but I don't want to compete with them but work along side. I am hoping this fills a niche where people can locate tools. It seems to be a common question "Where can I find SCCM tools" Where there are my blogs and many places to get them. This won't house all the tools but will have links to those that we can't or don't want to host. There more diverse places you have to download programs the more likely you are to have an older version. So this way we can link to SourceForge or someother "original" location so the author doesn't need to police the we. Nor do we need to hunt for the latest release

Request fix for SP1 --fixed!!1

Back in March I talked about a glitch in SCCM.
http://sms-hints-tricks.blogspot.com/2008/03/sccm-collections-with-apostrophes.html
Well I submitted it to Microsoft. They didn't know if they would be able to include it in SP1. Well over the weekend I upgraded to SP1 and it works now!

Yeah for me!

Policy Refresh

There are many tools out today that will help you force a policy refresh. I have one here on this blog. I also have an vbscript adv that I can pass to a collection that will run policy refresh on certain machines.

This can all be accomplished on SCCM through the Collection properties. You can now change a collection policy refresh to be different from your global policy. This is nice for test machines, lab machines or anything you want to be able to grab Adv and other information faster than normal.

Deploy Shortcut

I give credit to a co-worker of mine. We were deploying Hummingbird (3270 Terminal program) and we needed to create a shortcut to a predefined location for each person.

Here is a vbscript example of how to create a shortcut link on the fly


--------------------------------------------
'declare variables
dim WshShell, fso, oShellLink, strDesktop, strAppData

'set variables
set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
strDesktop = WshShell.SpecialFolders("Desktop")
strAppData = WshShell.ExpandEnvironmentStrings("%AppData%")

'do they have the profile data in their My Profile Space
if fso.FileExists(strAppData & "\Hummingbird\Connectivity\13.00\Profile\XYZ.hep") then
'create shortcut
set oShellLink = WshShell.CreateShortcut(strDesktop & "\VTAM.lnk")
oShellLink.TargetPath = strAppData & "\Hummingbird\Connectivity\13.00\Profile\VTAM.hep"
oShellLink.WindowStyle = 1
oShellLink.Description = "Hover description here"
oShellLink.Save
else
'they don't have them in the My Profile Space, should I move them there?
end if
--------------------------------------------------

sms last Hardware Scan < 60 days

Here is a query that will create a collection of computers that have not been seen in 60 days .
This will work in both SCCM and SMS. If the computer has not been inventoried in 60 days or more then it will be placed in this 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 inner join SMS_G_System_COMPUTER_SYSTEM on SMS_G_System_COMPUTER_SYSTEM.ResourceID = SMS_R_System.ResourceId where SMS_G_System_COMPUTER_SYSTEM.Name not in (select SMS_R_System.Name from SMS_R_System inner join SMS_G_System_WORKSTATION_STATUS on SMS_G_System_WORKSTATION_STATUS.ResourceID = SMS_R_System.ResourceId where SMS_G_System_WORKSTATION_STATUS.LastHardwareScan >= DateAdd(dd,-60,GetDate()) )
-------------------------------

Client actions for SCCM

Before I showed you how to launch client actions via VbScript in SMS. The same code can be used. There are some changes to the action names though. Here are the names you should use:

Software Inventory Collection Cycle
MSI Product Source Update Cycle
Hardware Inventory Collection Cycle
Software Updates Assignments Evaluation Cycle
Standard File Collection Cycle
Updates Source Scan CycleDiscovery Data Collection Cycle
Request & Evaluate User Policy
Peer DP Maintenance Task
Request & Evaluate Machine Policy
Software Metering Usage Report Cycle

Level 5 Guide free for short time.

Brian Tucker has decided that he will open the SCCM Guide to all registered users from 10:00 am - 12:00 pm next Wednesday August 13th for the people in the USA and eastern Europe time zones. The guide will also be open from 10:00 pm - 12:00 AM the same day to accommodate the users on the other side of the world.

http://blogcastrepository.com/blogs/brian_tucker/archive/2008/08/07/level-5-limited-event-wednesday-august-13th-2008.aspx

"##sub:netbiosname## doesn't work

If you moved from SMS 2003 to SCCM 2007 some of your right click tools might use "##sub:netbiosname## for the name of the computer as it is passed from the MMC to a tool. Some of these tools may fail. You will need to change it to "##sub:Name##. Most likely the tool should still function.