I'm Robert Marshall, director and senior consultant at SMSMarshall Ltd who's specialism is in the Microsoft System Center 2012 Configuration Manager product and all of its dependent products covering all aspects from Architecture, Implementation, Migration to Break-Fix.
I've been using computers for over 30 years, beginning as a programmer and now a senior consultant in an enterprise product. I only count my career as starting 17 years ago when I began my first serious role as a deployment engineer. I've seen 8 bit through to 64 bit, the rise and constant refinement of the GUI, the rise of the Internet from land-line based modem access to the powerful broadband connections we have today, mobile phones come into existence, and I've seen Microsoft evolve from a handful of employees to the company it is now while pretty much tinkering with every OS they have released; As well as seeing an industry that has evolved around those humble beginnings to become what we have today. You could call me an IT Dinosaur but I'm still as mentally able as I was back then, perhaps even more adept now since I've had broad exposure to so much and seen trends come and go. I'm a keen technical puzzle solver, which sets me apart as I love to solve gnarly problems around my area of specialism.
I like to share, i do so by blogging here, and helping out when I can as a moderator and answering questions when I have time on the TechNet Social forums for ConfigMgr 2012 and ConfigMgr 2007. I am a guest poster on TechNet UK Flash magazine and an MVP since 2009 (Most Valuable Professional) in the ECM (Enterprise Client Management) exclusively dedicated to ConfigMgr. the MVP status helps me to help others in more depth due to the closeness to the product group and access to other MVP's the program affords me.
The blogs pretty much about ConfigMgr, but on the odd occasion I also use it as a platform to express my random urges to post something I've stumbled across, be it technical or non-technical, and which I imagine would entertain you or what not as equally as it did me.
(2013)
A collegue of mine is currently tasked with looking at inventory for some clients, and he needs to invoke Resource Explorer quite a bit ... it's a time consuming process, as he has to first ID the client in the console (slow), right click (context menus can sometimes be slow to render) and launch Resource Explorer, all of which incurs a significant time penalty across the day.
Anyway, he could work this a bit more efficiently, so I showed him how:
' Script to launch Resource Explorer against a particular machine using a WMI query to return the ResourceID
' R Marshall - 2010
Dim strComputerName, WshShell
Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
strComputerName = ""
While strComputerName = "" or strSiteServer = ""
' Ignoring cancel, requires input for both input boxes or cannot run
' strSiteServer = "<YOURSERVERNAME>"
strSiteServer = inputBox("Enter the Site server name", "Connect to site server")
strComputerName = inputBox("Enter the Machines name", "Launch Resource Explorer")
WshShell.Run("mmc G:\sms\AdminUI\bin\resourceexplorer.msc -s -sms:ResExplrQuery=" & CHR(34) & "SELECT ResourceID FROM SMS_R_SYSTEM WHERE Name = '" & strComputerName & "'" & CHR(34) & " -sms:connection=\\" & strSiteServer & "\root\sms\site_ric")
Wend
Set WshShell = Nothing
You can hard code in the Site server name and comment out the prompt for Site Server name to shave some time off using the script ..
Took a few minutes to write this up, here's the resource I used to figure out how to call Resource Explorer: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb693736.aspx
Leave you to work out the permissions needed ...