I'm Rob Marshall, a consultant who specialises in the Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager product. I like to share, i do so by blogging and helping out when I can in the MS SMS newsgroups and participating in the ConfigMgr MVP program.
I was awarded and joined the program in 2009. It'd be an understatement to say it has to be one of the best experiences an IT engineer can have, if they really enjoy specialising in a product.
My biggest weapon for troubleshooting is, my formidable knowledge, no, only joking, you, the community. I find if I cannot answer a question, then I can usually find the answer from using Bing\Google, pouring over the documentation, and if that doesn't work, tinkering in mine or someone elses virtual lab.
The blogs pretty much about ConfigMgr, but it is also a platform for me to express my random urges to display something I've stumbled across, and that I imagine would entertain you or what not as equally as it did me.
Steve rattles out another quality write up, this time on Direct Access and ConfigMgr (please stop calling it SCCM folks!)
Do you have internet based clients that you want to manage? Does the idea of switching to SCCM native mode to manage those client make you nervous? Do you have Windows 2008 R2 servers in your environment and are the internet systems you want to manage running Windows 7 (Enterprise or Ultimate) or Windows Server 2008 R2? If you said yes to all of these questions then you might just be interested in taking a look at Direct Access (DA).
Direct Access is NOT a feature of SCCM but is a feature of Windows 2008 R2. There are several advantages to choosing Direct Access over native mode configuration in SCCM 1. There is no requirement to implement SCCM native mode 2. The feature is part of Windows 2008 R2 so likely would be supported by other than the SCCM team – yet SCCM can take full advantage of the service. 3. The SCCM team does not need to worry with certificate infrastructure support. Yes, there are certificates required by Direct Access but this is generally not something the SCCM team needs to worry about. 4. The SCCM client managed through Direct Access is just like a client installed on the internal LAN.
<Read more ...>