One of the less-known benefits of the SCCM Cloud Management Gateway is the ability to install the Configuration Manager client to devices that are not connected locally and manage those devices without ever being on the internal network. For example DMZ servers. To do so, the client must be installed by a command line with an SCCM CMG Bulk Registration Token. In this post, we will show how to use the Bulk Registration Token to enroll DMZ servers to the Cloud Management Gateway. Requirements Configuration Manager version 2002 or higher Supported OS for Config Manager Cloud Management Gateway configured See our post, Setup SCCM Cloud Management Gateway The certificate used for the Cloud Management Gateway must be trusted by the client that will be installed If the certificate is a Public certificate, with a CNAME, then this will be trusted by default If the certificate is generated by a private … Read More
How to use Desktop Analytics for Windows 10 Feature Update
Desktop Analytics is still a recent product and a small beast that require a bit of time and trial and error to get going. The goal of Desktop analytics is to give data to understand your environment prior to mass roll out a new Windows 10 Feature Update. Desktop Analytics isn’t a product to deploy a Windows 10 Feature Update. ConfigMgr remains the master of the actual deployment. In this blog post, we’ll detail real-world scenarios on how to use Desktop Analytics information to help during a Windows 10 Feature update deployment. Desktop Analytics Windows 10 Update Requirements See our previous post on how to setup Desktop Analytics and connect it to your SCCM/ConfigMgr/MEMCM environment prior to reading this post. Select devices to be evaluated by Desktop Analytics Here are a few questions to help determine which devices should be included. Should Windows 7 devices be included? Assuming you are … Read More
SCCM Powershell collection boundary groups
With SCCM 2002 that was just released, a small but extremely useful feature is now available in console. It is now possible to view what boundary group a device is connected to! This offers a new opportunity with collections based on Boundary groups, which could mean physical sites or any other meaningful needs in your environment. I’ve created a PowerShell script that automatically creates collections based on all the available boundary groups. Requirements SCCM must be at least version 2002. See our Step-by-step guide upgrade guide here SCCM Powershell collection boundary groups The script can be downloaded on GitHub, since Technet Gallery is retiring soon. Be sure to rate the submission if you are using it. Example of the result of the script Collection query for boundary groups Thanks to fellow SystemCenterDudes, Eswar Koneti, for his post about that exact query This isn’t the typical query for collections Note that … Read More
How to detect Office bitness with MEMCM global condition
I recently came across an issue where a MEMCM) Global condition was detecting the Office bitness (architecture), but only to one specific version(example below). This lead to a requirement issue where the computer was running another version of Office that wasn’t covered by the global condition. With that said, we still needed a requirement only for the architecture of Office, while the version was not that important for now. I’ve uploaded a new script to Technet Gallery that returns the Office Bitness no matter what version is installed (from Office XP to the latest). In this post, I’ll describe how to use the script with a MEMCM global condition as a requirement for an application. MEMCM Global Condition Office Bitness Requirement Download the Office Bitness detection script from Github The script The script is looking at the Bitness registry key of Outlook. The script will return the value of Bitness. … Read More
How to upgrade SCCM SQL version
SQL Server is obviously a key component to take care of, for a healthy SCCM infrastructure. While SCCM supports a wide variety of SQL Server versions, keeping it up to date may be a good idea to avoid getting out of support. In this post, we will detail how to upgrade SCCM SQL 2014 to SQL 2017. SQL 2019 is available for a couple of weeks, but it’s still not listed as supported in the SCCM documentation. If you’re looking to install SQL 2017 from scratch, jump to our post on this topic. Upgrade SCCM SQL version Requirements Current SQL versions must be one of the following : SQL Server 2008 SP4 or later SQL Server 2008 R2 SP3 or later SQL Server 2012 SP2 or later SQL Server 2014 or later SQL Server 2016 or later Download SQL reporting services Download SQL Management studio The operating system is still … Read More