Change device ownership – The journey through log files, WMI and PowerShell of ConfigMgr 2012

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Last week I’ve got the question about how to quickly change the device owner of all mobile devices. This question was based on the fact that by default the device owner is set to Personal and that default value cannot be changed. The Configuration Manager console answer is easy, select the devices, right-click and select Change Ownership.  But now the real question(s), how does this work and is this scriptable? This blog post will contain my small journey through the SMSProv.log, WMI, PowerShell and TechNet for an answer. PowerShell part I – Change Ownership After a quick browse through the cmdlet referent on TechNet, I noticed that this should be very easy to achieve via PowerShell. There is a cmdlet available Set-CMDeviceOwnership that does exactly …

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Add Update Content to a Deployment Package via PowerShell in ConfigMgr 2012

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Last week I read a forum question about downloading updates in a software update group. I thought that I could create an easy example, but it wasn’t all as easy as I thought it would. As there is no cmdlet available that performs this specific action, I went back to WMI. In WMI there is a method AddUpdateContent in the SMS_SoftwareUpdatesPackage that should do the trick. After playing around with it for a while I noticed that this method is not as straight-forward as it looks. The method The main problem I had with this method, was the documentation, or better, the lack of documentation. The SDK only contains a very old example that also doesn’t seem to use the right order for the parameters. …

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Verify local administrators via PowerShell and Compliance Settings in ConfigMgr 2012

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Everybody probably knows the inventory posts for local administrators by Sherry Kissinger, but what if you want to know the compliance of your devices. What if you “just” want to know if a device is compliant to company defaults for the local administrators. This blog post will provide an answer to that question. It will provide a script, including explanation, that can be used for compliance checks. This blog post won’t go into details about creating the Configuration Item and the additional Configuration Baseline. Script The script that will be the core of this Configuration Item consists of three key parts. Basically, it first finds the members of the local administrators group on the device, then verifies these members and in the end it returns …

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What is smsdpusage.exe?

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This time I’ve got another short post, which could be seen as a sort of follow-up on last weeks post. As this post is also about an executable that is used within a scheduled task. Since ConfigMgr 2012 R2 there is a new built-in report named Distribution point usage summary. This report can be used to view details about how individual distribution points are utilized, including how many unique clients access the distribution point, how many request are processed by the distribution point and how much data is send from the distribution point. To generate content for these reports there is a new executable named smsdpusage.exe. This executable starts the distribution point usage process. When this process starts, it evaluates the IIS logs, of the …

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What is smsdpmon.exe?

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A short post this time with an even short title. As I was working on documenting the content library and its content validation, one of the things I ran into was smsdpmon.exe. As I was not familiar with this executable, I thought it would be a good idea to write about my findings on it. This executable is used to start the content validation process. The validated content can be anything that is distributed to the distribution point and available in the content library. When the content validation process starts, ConfigMgr verifies the hash of the content files on the specific distribution point with the hash in the database and if the hash is unexpected for the content files on the distribution point, it creates …

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Five key configuration steps for implementing Internet-based clients in ConfigMgr 2012

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This blog post is about the key configuration steps for implementing Internet-based clients in ConfigMgr 2012. By key configuration steps, I’m talking about the configuration of the web server certificate, IIS, site systems, site system roles and client installations. To understand these steps, knowledge of certificates, IIS and ConfigMgr is required, because it’s not a step-by-step configuration guide. Prerequisites Before going through these steps, there are a few important prerequisites that should be in place: Site systems for Internet-based client management must have connectivity to the Internet and must be in an Active Directory domain. A supporting public key infrastructure (PKI) has to be in place, that can deploy and manage the certificates that the clients require and that are managed on the Internet and …

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Running a Service Management Automation (SMA) Runbook during a task sequence in ConfigMgr 2012

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It’s been a few weeks since my last blog post, but here is a new one again. This time my blog post will be about running a Service Management Automation (SMA) Runbook during a task sequence. I will show this functionality by using an example scenario of moving a computer to a different OU.  A bit more than a year ago I did something similar but then via a Orchestrator Runbook, so this time I will take it a level further. For some, maybe even most, people and companies it might be a level to far, for now, but I would like to share it anyway. As I like ConfigMgr, PowerShell and automation, I like to prefer SMA above Orchestrator. Also, SMA will become more …

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Installing Windows Features via Compliance Settings in ConfigMgr 2012

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This weeks’ post will be about Installing Windows Features via Compliance Settings. In most cases the normal route for installing Windows Features will be the application model But what if checking for the installation of a Windows Feature is part of a Configuration Baseline, is it than possible to make the installation of a Windows Feature also part of the baseline? The answer to this question is, yes. In my case, I have a Windows 8.1 Configuration Baseline and one of the Configuration Items in the baseline checks for the installation of the Telnet Client. When the Telnet Client is not installed a script will start to remediate that by installing the Telnet Client. This way I get the complete compliance of a device, to …

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Using Service Management Automation (SMA) for tweeting status messages of ConfigMgr 2012

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Already a bit more then a year ago I did a post about Tweeting the deployment status of a system via Orchestrator and ConfigMgr 2012. Sadly enough, the Integration Pack for Orchestrator, that I used in that post, doesn’t work anymore with the most recent Twitter API updates. As I still do get questions and comments about it, I thought it would be a good time to come up with an alternative. One thing was for sure, it had to be something custom. So easy decision here, PowerShell it is. The next thing is a bit more questionable, how will the script be started… This is the more difficult decision… either run it standalone, via Orchestrator, or via Service Management Automation (SMA). A standalone PowerShell …

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Finally a 1.0 version of the Show Collection Details right-click action for ConfigMgr 2012!

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I do have to admit that it took quite a while before I finally made a 1.0 version of this script/ form. Now it’s there, I also have to admit that I’m even a bit proud of it! It was a nice way of getting familiar with PowerShell and WMI. What does it look like? I won’t go through the list of all the fields that the tool shows, that list can be found here, but I did make a small movie for this final release with an overview about all the functionalities. Show Collection Details of a Device Where is it available? As of now this final version of my Collection Details Form is publicly available via the TechNet Galleries and for a direct …

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