An ordinary guy trying to make a difference
UK Tech Days is a week-long series of free events run by Microsoft and technical communities to celebrate and inspire developers, IT professionals and IT Managers to get more from Microsoft technology. Our day events in London from 12th to 16th April will cover the latest technology releases including Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft Office 2010, Virtualisation, Silverlight, Microsoft Windows 7 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2, plus events focusing on deployment and an IT Manager day.
Monday, 12 April 2010 Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Launch - A Path to Big Ideas (For Heads of development and Software Architects) This launch event is aimed at development managers, heads of development and software architects who want to hear how Visual Studio 2010 can help build better applications whilst taking advantage of great integration with other key technologies. NB – Day 2 will cover the technical in-depth sessions aimed at developers
Tuesday, 13 April 2010 Getting started with Microsoft .NET Framework 4 and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Microsoft and industry experts will share their perspectives on the top new and useful features with core programming languages and in the framework and tooling, such as -- ASP.NET MVC, Parallel Programming, Entity Framework 4, and the offerings around rich client and web development experiences.
Wednesday, 14 April 2010 The Essential MIX Join us for the Essential MIX as we continue exploring the art and science of creating great user experiences. Learn about the next generation ASP.NET & Silverlight platforms that make it a rich and reach world.
Thursday, 15 April 2010 Best of Breed Client Applications on Microsoft Windows 7 Windows 7 adoption is happening at a startling pace. In this demo-driven day, we’ll look at the developer landscape around Windows 7 to get you up to speed on the operating system that’ll your applications will run on through the new decade.
Friday, 16 April 2010 – Registration opening soon! Windows phone Day Join us for a practical day of detailed Windows Phone7 development sessions covering the new Windows Phone specification, application standards and services
Monday, 12 April 2010
Virtualization Summit – From the Desktop to the Datacentre
Designed to provide you with an understanding of the key products & technologies enabling seamless physical and virtual management, interoperable tools, and cost-savings & value.
Tuesday, 13 April 2010 Office 2010 - Experience the Next Wave in Business Productivity
The event will cover how the improvements to Office, SharePoint, Exchange, Project and Visio will provide a practical platform that will allow IT professionals to not only solve problems and deliver business value, but also demonstrate this value to IT’s stakeholders.
Wednesday, 14 April 2010 Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 – Deployment made easy
This event will provide you with an understanding of these tools including the new Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010, Windows Deployment services and the Application Compatibility Toolkit. Understanding of these tools including the new Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010, Windows Deployment Services. We will also take you through the considerations for deploying Windows Server 2008 R2 and migrating your server roles.
Thursday, 15 April 2010 SQL Server 2008 R2 – The Information Platform Highlighting the new capabilities of the platform, as well as diving into specific topics, such as consolidating SQL Server databases, and tips and techniques for Performance Monitoring and Tuning as well as looking at our newly released Cloud platform SQL Azure.
Friday, 16 April 2010 (IT Managers)
Looking ahead, keeping the boss happy and raising the profile of IT IT Managers have more and more responsibilities to drive and support the direction of the business. We’ll explore the various trends and technologies that can bring IT to the top table, from score-carding to data governance and cloud computing.
For more information and to register goto:
http://www.microsoft.com/uk/techdays/
Please read the following post from Jeff who needs our feedback to help with his upcoming series of blog posts:
Hey everyone, we are commencing a 5 part series on this blog about Client Deployment, and based on some recent trends, publications and evaluations we have determined there are 5 topics we will focus on. These will post in the below order. The topics are as follows:
Some other topics are absolutely meshed into this, for example training, virtualization, security, hardware refresh and the end user experience, so we will ensure we also touch on these for you.
I hope these sound interesting. I would love to hear from you and your experiences about these topics. Your stories could make these even more interesting for our community.
Do you have an experience, good or bad that was a learning in your deployment? Did something you or your organization figure out really help your Client Deployment? I would love to hear your stories. If you have something to contribute, or comment on, or want to share some advice, ping us a note, we want to roll these into our coverage.
We really look forward to hearing from you!
Jeff Wettlaufer Sr. Technical Product Manager System Center
http://blogs.technet.com/systemcenter/archive/2010/02/26/client-deployment-with-system-center.aspx
This could be one of those really useful snippets to file away somewhere:
“You're trying to do some basic troubleshooting on your network and you ping a machine but it doesn't respond. You know its there. Why isn't it responding? It's probably the firewall on the machine that's causing the problem. In this screencast you'll see how to create a firewall rule that will allow the machine to respond to a PING, (ICMPv4 Echo Request).”
http://edge.technet.com/Media/Creating-a-Firewall-Rule-to-Allow-ICMPv4-Echo-Requests/
Those of you who have been following my blog (thank you), will see that I try to blog as much on the System Center suite and other topics that interest me and that I think will be of interest to you. However, the problem I’ve had for sometime is with the sheer volume of content “out there” and an ever growing “wishlist” I need to work smarter not harder.
This was one of the key drivers for me creating the FAQShop Twitter feed to basically capture and summarise this vast amount of information in one place for us all. The thing I really like about Twitter is because of it’s 140 character limit the posts are kept bite-sized plus Twitter offers a RSS feed for each account so you can sign up to one feed and literally get a wealth of information without having to ever look at Twitter.
ConfigMgr has always been (and will always be I hope), my passion. So from now on I’ll be limiting my blog posts just to ConfigMgr and ConfigMgr-related posts.
Please let me have your thoughts and comments on this as after all if I think I’m meeting your needs but failing then I’m not achieving what I’m setting out to.
BTW if you’re interested checkout FAQShop on Twitter at (no prizes for guessing) http://www.twitter.com/faqshop. I also have my own personal account (cliffhobbs) which feeds into the FAQShop one.
Well, it was long overdue in coming but we’re pleased to announce that the home for the App-V Team blog has now changed. Out is the old http://blogs.technet.com/SoftGrid URL we used to use and in is the new http://blogs.technet.com/AppV URL we've begun using this week. What, you didn't notice? That's thanks to our wonderful blog admins who simply put a redirect on the old site, mirroring the content and sending all traffic to the new site instead.
So what does this mean to you? Really not much, but if you have any RSS or ATOM subscriptions you might want to update them to point to the new feed URL instead. All existing subscriptions should continue to work but we can't guarantee how long the old SoftGrid site will remain live and we'd hate for you to miss out on an important announcement because your subscription wasn't updating. If you have any old shortcuts or bookmarks you're hanging onto, you might want to update those as well.
Aside from this it should look like the same blog you've become familiar with since we launched it way back in 2007. As always, thanks for reading and if you have any suggestions or feedback don't hesitate to send us a note.
The App-V Team
From the Configuration Manager Writers - Announcements, Comments and other Stuff blog:
In case you missed them, the following posts were published on the System Center Configuration Manager Team Blog for the time period January 26th, 2010 – February 26th, 2010:
Things you need to know when using Windows Embedded Standard 2009
Announcement: Configuration Manager Documentation Library Update for January 2010
Announcing the Release of Configuration Manager 2007 SuperFlows!!
Announcement: Configuration Manager Documentation Library Update for February 2010
http://blogs.technet.com/wemd_ua_-_sms_writing_team/archive/2010/02/26/round-up-of-new-posts-on-the-configuration-manager-team-blog-january-26th-2010-february-26th-2010.aspx
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee849855(WS.10).aspx
Overview
The Windows Server 2008 R2 Migration Utilities package works with Windows Server Migration Tools to let you migrate Hyper-V and Routing and Remote Access Services. Detailed, step-by-step information about how to use the Windows Server 2008 R2 Migration Utilities package to complete these migrations is available in the Hyper-V Server Migration Guide and the Routing and Remote Access Server Migration Guide . After you install this item, you may have to restart your computer.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=5c1ec14a-e9d7-46ea-9c6e-73d6bc4219b4&displaylang=en
Language(s): English.
Product(s): Microsoft System Center.
Audience(s): IT Generalist.
Duration: 60 Minutes
Start Date: Wednesday, March 03, 2010 11:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada)
Event Overview Microsoft System Center helps you get the most from your mission-critical messaging infrastructure with management solutions that enhance the availability features built into Microsoft Exchange Server 2010. In this webcast, we look at how System Center can improve the health and availability of your servers running Exchange with the Exchange Server 2010 Management Pack for Microsoft Operations Manager 2007 and Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2007. System Center has application awareness built into its management solutions to help deliver guidance and best practices to Exchange administrators, ensuring service level agreements (SLAs) are met and saving organizations money.
Presenters: Leslie Kitz, Program Manager, Microsoft Corporation and Jon LeCroy, Program Manager, Microsoft Corporation
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?culture=en-US&EventID=1032437151
From The Operations Manager Support Team Blog:
A large and sudden increase in the number of alerts is called an alert storm. An alert storm can be a symptom of massive changes of some kind within your management group, such as the catastrophic failure of networks. An alert storm can also be a symptom of configuration issues within Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007.
Installing new or updated management packs can give rise to an alert storm. Monitors in a management pack begin working as soon as the management pack has been imported. Use best practices in importing management packs to minimize alert storms.
For general, real-time monitoring of alerts, use the Active Alerts view. Make sure Scope is not active and hiding alerts.
Check for large numbers of alerts when your network undergoes changes. Monitor closely when you install a new management pack.
Operations Manager 2007 offers reports that can be useful in identifying alert storms. From an Operations console with access to a reporting server, look at the Microsoft Generic Report Library. The reports Most Common Alerts and Most Common Events help identify high-volume alerts.
If you are getting a large number of alerts that do not point to issues in your managed systems, you need to modify the monitors or rules that create those alerts.
View active alert details in the Monitoring pane. Alert Details specifies the monitor or rule for an alert.
1. Log on to the computer with an account that is a member of the Operations Manager Advanced Operator role for the Operations Manager 2007 management group.
2. In the Operations console, click the Authoring button.
3. In the Authoring pane, expand Management Pack Objects and then click Monitors.
4. In the Monitors pane, expand an object type completely and then click a monitor.
5. On the Operations console toolbar, click Overrides and then point to Override the Monitor. You can choose to override this monitor for objects of a specific type or for all objects within a group. After you choose which group of object type to override, the Override Properties dialog box opens, enabling you to view the default settings contained in this monitor. You can then choose whether to override each individual setting contained in the monitor.
Note: If the Overrides button is not available, make sure you have selected a monitor and not a container object in the Monitors pane.
6. Click to place a check mark in the Override column next to each setting that you want to override.
7. Either select a management pack from the Select destination management pack list or create a new unsealed management pack by clicking New.
Note: By default, when you create a management pack object, disable a rule or monitor, or create an override, Operations Manager saves the setting to the Default Management Pack. As a best practice, you should create a separate management pack for each sealed management pack you want to customize, rather than saving your customized settings to the Default Management Pack. For more information, see Default Management Pack.
8. When you complete your changes, click OK.
Note: The procedure for overriding rules is the same as for monitors. See how your overrides affect the amount of alerts and continue to fine-tune the monitors as necessary.
For more details see http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb309455.aspx
Rules offer the option of suppressing duplicate alerts. A suppressed alert is not displayed in the Operations console.
Operations Manager 2007 suppresses only duplicate alerts as defined by the alert suppression criteria. Fields stated in the suppression criteria must be identical for the alert to be considered a duplicate and suppressed. An alert must be created by the same rule and be unresolved to be considered a duplicate.
Certain rule subtypes can raise an alert as a response to a successful criteria match. By default, an alert is created for each instance of the criteria match. This might not be useful to operations personnel if each new alert instance is displayed in the Operator console as a new issue. OpsMgr allows you to configure the rule so that duplicate instances of the alert are suppressed, or hidden, within an existing, but unresolved, alert. When the representative alert is resolved, so are all suppressed alerts within it.
Alert suppression is rule-based and a rule can only suppress alerts that it generated. If two different alert-generating rules matched the same event, then two unique alerts would appear in the MOM Operator console.
Important
The operations personnel using your Management Pack might want to configure your rules to suppress additional parameters in the events. The event collection rules might not collect these parameters by default, and therefore suppressing on these parameters would not be possible. In building your event collection rules, make sure that you configure them to collect these additional parameters. Security Log events are a good example of events that end users will want to suppress.
Alert suppression policy is highly-configurable but default settings (Computer and Domain checked) satisfy most Management Pack needs. Custom alert suppression policy might be used in the following cases:
A rule executes a script that runs a number of health checks on an application. As a result, the script might generate two or more different alerts directly from the script code. The author suppresses on "Alert Name".
A rule is configured to generate an alert, based on an event that might expose different health states and problems. In this case, the difference in the heath states can be distinguished by the text in the description. The author can suppress by "Description" such that unique alerts are generated when the descriptions vary.
Note: Suppressing on description can be problematic if the description consists of non-static text. For example, suppressing on a description that contains dates and times would not work as expected.
J.C. Hornbeck | System Center Knowledge Engineer
http://blogs.technet.com/operationsmgr/archive/2010/02/25/troubleshooting-alert-storms-in-opsmgr-2007.aspx
From the System Center Configuration Manager Team Blog:
The Configuration Manager documentation library (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb680651.aspx) has been updated on the Web and the latest content on the Web has Updated: February 1, 2010 at the top of the topic.
This month's updates incorporate customer feedback. We do value customer feedback and try to incorporate it when possible. Although we can't promise to make the docs perfect for everybody, we are committed to continual improvement. So, keep that feedback coming, and feel free to contact us about anything related to the documentation by using our usual address of SMSDocs@Microsoft.com.
What's New in the Configuration Manager Documentation Library for February 2010
The following information lists the topics that contain significant changes since the January 2010 update.
Supported Operating Systems and Hard Disk Configurations for Operating System Deployment
- Updated to clarify that Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 are supported by operating system deployment in Configuration Manager 2007 SP2.
Operating System Deployment Task Sequence Variables
- Updated to add the _SMSTSTimezone task sequence variable.
Apply Network Settings Task Sequence Action Variables
- Updated to correct the name of the OSDDNSSuffixSearchOrder task sequence variable.
Log Files for Operating System Deployment
- Updated to correct the location of the CreateTSMedia.log file.
How to Verify That Site Information Is Published to Active Directory Domain Services
- Updated to clarify that Configuration Manager 2007 does not use the msSMSSiteBoundaries attribute for the site code object.
Program Properties Page and Program Name Properties: Environment Tab
- Updated with corrected information that Allow users to interact with this program is available only when Program can run is configured for Only when a user is logged on or Whether or not a user is logged on.
Configuration Manager in Multiple Active Directory Forests
- Updated to clarify that to discover a computer resource in another forest by using Active Directory System Discovery, there must be a forest trust between the site server forest and the forest where the computer is located. The absence of the trust is also added to Troubleshooting Discovery Issues and the troubleshooting entry "Discovery Does Not Return Any Results". For more troubleshooting information about this requirement, see The Configuration Manager Support Team Blog post: Configuration Manager AD system discovery will not work across external trusts starting with Service Pack 2.
-- The Configuration Manager Writing Team
http://blogs.technet.com/configmgrteam/archive/2010/02/25/announcement-configuration-manager-documentation-library-update-for-february-2010.aspx
From the OOB Management blog:
Support for AMT provisioning through SCCM was introduced in SCCM SP1. Being able to manage systems through AMT is extremely useful and there is a good amount of documentation already about using SCCM and AMT. Working through this technology I thought it would be helpful to have flowcharts that document how provisioning works both with SCCM natively supported AMT systems (AMT firmware version 3.2.1 forward) vs. legacy provisioning (firmware less than 3.2.1)…
You can read more and download the flowcharts at http://blogs.msdn.com/steverac/archive/2009/09/02/sccm-amt-provisioning-flowcharts.aspx
J.C. Hornbeck | Manageability Knowledge Engineer
http://blogs.technet.com/oob/archive/2010/02/25/configuration-manager-2007-amt-provisioning-flowcharts.aspx
From the App-V Blog:
The App-V 4.6 client has been tested extensively with pre-4.6 sequenced packages.
If you have 4.5 RTM packages which use MSI for deployment, then they will have to be updated (4.5 CU1 and SP1 MSIs are not affected by this). There are three ways to update your 4.5 RTM packages:
You could also write a batch script to convert multiple MSIs using option 1 and 3.
You could get the Power Shell tool from here.
param ( [string]$root ) # Pass in the root location where all the *.msi exist
if (-not $root) { write-error "No root specified" return 1 }
$files = Get-ChildItem -Path $root -Recurse -Include *.msi # Recursively search for all *.msi in $root
foreach ($file in $files) { Write-Host Operating on $file
$p = Start-Process "\\bin\msitran.exe" -wait -PassThru -argumentlist "-a","\\launchcondition.mst","$($file.FullName)"
if ($p.ExitCode -ne 0) { Write-Host "MSItran returned error code $($p.ExitCode) for $($file.FullName)" }
}
To run: \\MsiTran_Apply_Transform.ps1 C:\msi_test This will run MsiTran_Apply_Transform.ps1 script with root parameter C:\msi_folder
param ( [string]$root ) # Pass in the root location where all the *.sprj exist
if (-not $root) { write-error "no root specified" return 1 }
$files = Get-ChildItem -Path $root -Recurse -Include *.sprj # Recursively search for all *.sprj in $root
foreach ($file in $files) { Write-Host Operating on $file start-process 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft Application Virtualization Sequencer\sftsequencer.exe' -wait -argumentlist "/open:""$($file.FullName)""","/msi" #Provide full path of sftsequencer.exe
if ($? -ne "True") { Write-Host "Error while opening file on Command Line Sequencer" } }
To run: .\Sequencer_Open_msi.ps1 C:\sprj_folder This will run Sequencer_Open_msi.ps1 script with root parameter C:\sprj_folder
Nidhi Doshi App-V team
http://blogs.technet.com/appv/archive/2010/02/25/how-to-use-pre-4-6-msi-packages-with-the-app-v-4-6-client.aspx
Forefront Security for Exchange Server
978297 Description of Hotfix Rollup 1 for Service Pack 2 for Forefront Security for Exchange Server
978915 Cumulative update package 8 for SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 3
979042 FIX: The principal database is not recovered if the database has a large number of virtual log files in SQL Server 2005
201512 How to Uninstall SQL Compact 3.5 after installing SQL Server 2008
978518 FIX: Error message in SQL Server 2005 when you run an update statement on a database whose compatibility level is 6"Msg 4104, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 The multi-part identifier . could not be bound"
979549 FIX: Data is corrupted when you update data that is in an LOB column in a SQL Server 2005 transactional replication
979777 FIX: You experience some problems when you perform a grouping members operation on an Excel pivot table whose data source is an SSAS 2005 cube
201912 A Data Collector collection set may fail to upload if a cache file is corrupted
201768 Operations Manager 2007 Management Group is not distributing new configuration to agents
Start Date: 2/24/2010 Start Time: 1:30 PM EST (GMT -5) End Time: 2:30 PM EST (GMT -5)
Come join Microsoft and Keith Combs, Senior PM in the Microsoft Server and Tools Online (STO) organization for a Live Chat on deploying Windows 7. The deployment tools used to roll out Microsoft desktop software continues to improve so come take advantage of this time to talk with your peers and get some questions answered about Windows 7 deployment.
http://windows.ittoolbox.com/research/chat-with-microsoft-expert-on-windows-7-deployment-tools-and-techniques-21317?r=WhitePaper+Alert+v2h&subtype=&mid=1878226