System Center 2012 Endpoint Protection point in System Center 2012 Configuration Manager (RC)

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Last week there was finally another update on ConfigMgr 2012. Besides some small changes, they also slightly changed the name of the products in the System Center –family. It all (including Endpoint Protection) now starts with System Center 2012! This post will be about the new Endpoint Protection point in System Center 2012 Configuration Manager. During the beta’s it was already clear that Microsoft was going to change something about the integration of ConfigMgr 2012 and FEP 2012, and they did! They removed the Endpoint Protection from the Forefront –family and fully integrated it with ConfigMgr 2012! I also mentioned before that I’m not really the “step-by-step guide maker”, but in some cases there are exceptions and this is another one of these cases. In …

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Received the Microsoft Community Contributor 2011 award!

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Today I was pleasantly surprised that I received the following mail from Microsoft. Congratulations! We’re pleased to inform you that your contributions to Microsoft online technical communities have been recognized with the Microsoft Community Contributor Award. The Microsoft Community Contributor Award is reserved for participants who have made notable contributions in Microsoft online community forums such as TechNet, MSDN and Answers. The value of these resources is greatly enhanced by participants like you, who voluntarily contribute your time and energy to improve the online community experience for others. Thank you Microsoft!

System Center 2012 Configuration Manager RC1 is available!

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For those who didn’t read it on Twitter (my Twitter almost exploded), Facebook or mail yet, ConfigMgr 2012 RC1 is available for download! For more information, read here the mail of Microsoft Connect: We are extremely excited to announce the availability of the release candidates for System Center 2012 Configuration Manager and System Center 2012 Endpoint Protection (formerly known as Forefront Endpoint Protection 2012) today. Both releases are available through a single download package on the Microsoft Download Center.  You can learn more about this release at our Server and Cloud Platform blog. Thank you for your on-going program participation and product feedback as it was instrumental in achieving this important milestone!  Our next CEP session will focus on the System Center 2012 Configuration Manager …

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ConfigMgr 2007 and creating a non-recurring Maintenance Window by script

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At my current customer they’re not using the Software Updates of ConfigMgr 2007 (yet), but there was a wish for a more controlled company-wide deployment without having to change all the current advertisements (and the whole deployment system). So the idea came to create (and delete) maintenance windows by script (when needed). Luckily the ConfigMgr 2007 SDK has some pretty straight forward examples of creating and deleting maintenance windows (see also the links at the end of this post). Deleting a maintenance window was almost just copy-paste from the SDK, the tricky part was creating a maintenance window and then especially the non-recurring schedule. At the end, this is (the short version of) what we ended up with: ‘==================================================== ‘ MAIN – Set connection, schedule …

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Application Relationships in ConfigMgr 2012 (B2)

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As we all know now for a while already, ConfigMgr 2012 (B2) has a new Application Model. The old fashion Packages are still possible, but there is nothing changed and no features added. They are just there to make a migration easier… Instead we’ve got Applications now, which make it easier to detect installed products, to create dependencies, to supersede, etc.. This post I want shine a light on the different relationships of an Application. ConfigMgr 2012 (B2) knows three different types of relationships for an Application: Dependencies Supersedence Global Conditions Dependencies Let’s start with the first relationship, dependencies. Dependencies make it easy to specify the software prerequisites of an Application. The cool thing is that this can be multiple things and it can even …

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Using USMT 4.0 and ConfigMgr 2007 while migrating from local profiles to partially redirected profiles

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This time I want to devote a post to a situation I haven’t been in that often. The customer was migrating from Windows XP to Windows 7, well.. nothing special here, but also migrating from local profiles to (partially) redirected profiles, well.. that’s a challenge. So to capture the userdata AND -settings we had to come up with something special. Of course we could do some things with scripting, but the biggest challenge was the fact that the new (partially redirected) profile location was only available after the first logon to Windows 7. With this information I started thinking about USMT 4.0 again. Most often you use this to migrate on a computer basis, but we made an exception on this. We came up with …

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Auto Deployment of FEP Definition Updates with ConfigMgr 2007

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This week Microsoft released Forefront Endpoint Protection (FEP) 2010 Update Rollup 1 (including some extra tools). The tools update included some extra policies and also a Definition Update Automation Tool. Together with this, there was also an article published about Definition Update Automation with Configuration Manager. Personally I don’t like the idea of creating a new Task with the Windows Task Scheduler, while we’ve got Status Filter Rules within ConfigMgr. With these rules we can make a “connection” between the scheduled synchronization of the Software Update Point (SUP) and the start of the Definition Update Automation Tool. Otherwise the tool might run while there hasn’t been a new synchronization of the SUP. To prevent this, I will show in this post how to create the …

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The best informational links about FEP 2010 (and its integration with ConfigMgr 2007)

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This time I want to devote a post to some of the best informational links about Forefront Endpoint Protection (FEP) 2010 (and its integration with ConfigMgr 2007). These links can make it a lot easier to plan, scale, install, manage and troubleshoot your ConfigMgr 2007 with FEP 2010 integrated -environment. FEP 2010 General Information  – This link provides some general information about FEP 2010. Link: http://www.microsoft.com/fep/ FEP 2010 Deployment Case Study @Microsoft – This link provides some information about the case study used by Microsoft IT for FEP 2010. Link: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg543127.aspx FEP 2010 TechNet Library – This link provides all the information available in the Microsoft TechNet Library about FEP 2010. It includes planning, scaling, installing and managing a FEP 2010 –environment, with or without …

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Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2012 Beta is available!

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For those who didn’t read it on Twitter, Facebook or mail yet, MDT 2012 B1 is available for download! Some of the best things that are mentioned in the release notes, are that it supports ConfigMgr 2012 B2 and also still supports ConfigMgr 2007 SP2! Besides that it also supports the deployment of ALL operating systems from Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 until now. So it only delivers extra’s! For more information, read here the mail of Microsoft Connect: Thanks for your ongoing interest and participation in the MDT beta review program. We hope you’ll take the time to preview and provide feedback on MDT 2012 Beta 1. Download the beta materials on Connect: https://connect.microsoft.com/site14/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=8689 Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2012 Beta 1 rides the …

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Forefront Endpoint Protection 2012 B for ConfigMgr 2012 B2

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There was still something missing with ConfigMgr 2012 B2 and that was the Forefront Endpoint Protection (FEP) integration. Well, that’s been taking care of now. It’s now available already for a week (see: Forefront Endpoint Security Blog), so it’s about time to take a first look at it. The installation hasn’t changed much since FEP 2010 with ConfigMgr 2007 (see also: ConfigMgr 2007 and Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010), except that it’s now ConfigMgr 2012 B2 aware. The first thing that I noticed was that the FEP 2012 B client is not really the FEP 2012 client yet, but the still FEP 2010 client (evaluation version). Both have version number 2.0.657.0. The next thing that I noticed was that there actually didn’t change that much… Of …

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