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System Center Team announces SCCM 2007 R3

Looks like Microsoft is releasing a "Green IT" release for SCCM....

As posted by Jeff Wettlaufer (Sr. Technical Product Manager System Center at Microsoft)

There are a few areas of focus for ConfigMgr R3, with the main engineering effort concentrating on Power Management.  Here are the goals for this feature:

Power Management
The goal of this capability is to enable Configuration Manager to further reduce the operational costs of IT by providing basic power management features native to the product.  Our approach is based on 3 primary areas:

A. Help the organization plan a power strategy by monitoring current power state and consumptions and reporting on machine utilization trends, current power settings and current energy consumption

B. Enable the Administrator to easily create, deploy and enforce specific power settings using the existing ConfigMgr infrastructure 
   −Ability to set peak and non-peak schedules
   −Ability to remediate settings if changed
   −Ability to opt out machines from power policy

C. Provide the business meaningful report formats that are relevant to Power Management

An effective approach to power management needs to maximize power policy deployment while minimizing the impact to the end-user. System Center Configuration Manager helps customers further reduce their operational costs by adding new in box capability to their ConfigMgr infrastructure, and by seamlessly enabling power management client agent services to their existing Collection landscape.

In addition to power management, ConfigMgr R3 will provide customers with enhanced scale and performance support above current numbers.  In addition, further capabilities – in time for your Window 7 deployments – around Operating System Deployment will be enabled.

Configuration Manager 2007 R3 will release will release as a beta at the end of October 2009, with a targeted release of late Q1 calendar 2010.  Continued blogging and product news, Twitter updates, interviews with key people on the project, and some videos and demos of the new code in action will be releasing over the coming months.

Configuration Manager 2007 SP2 RC released!

As posted by Cliff Hobbs on wmug.co.uk.

It’s official, the RC of SP2 is now available for download from Connect.

IMPORTANT: Remember that that Microsoft only supports TAP Customers running this in Production. If you’re not a TAP customer then make sure you only run it in your lab.

More details:

The System Center Configuration Manager team would like to announce that the following has been released and available for download:

Configuration Manager 2007 Service Pack 2 Release Candidate

This is the official Release Candidate build for Configuration Manager 2007 SP2.

New features:

• Refer to the SP2 Overview article posted on the primary Configuration Manager MSConnect site for all the new features and new supported configurations
• Hotfixes included in SP2 article can be found on the primary Configuration Manager MSConnect page.
• Deployment guides for BranchCache and the new AMT features are available in the download section.
• The new OpsMgr07 R2 ConfigMgr07 Management Pack can also be downloaded, this supports 64bit OpsMgr client agents.
• Please review the Release Notes before performing any installation and upgrade.

Feedback and Support:

• All registered Sp2 Open Beta users can submit bugs, design change requests (DCR’s), and other feedback. See the help link on the ConfigMgr MSConnect homepage for more instructions.
• Newsgroups are a great way to post questions and receive general support question answers.

If you experience any issues with the download or the MSConnect site please contact, sccmtap@microsoft.com

Regards,

The Configuration Manager Customer Team

SCCM 2007 R2 on Server 2008 Weird WebDAV errors on MP installation

I was messing about with installing SCCM 2007 R2 on a Windows Server 2008 box. Everything went nice and smooth up to the point where my Windows PE for building and capturing an image would just Initialize and then spontaneously reboot…

So I decided to dive into the smsts.log (located in x:\SMSTSLOG or c:\smstslog, depending if your task-sequence was able to format the c:\ drive allready )

In there I found some errors relating to my MP ( No MP Certificates found). From there on I decided to check out my Site and Component status in the SCCM Console and found out that my Management point was having issues with the WebDAV configuration, so I zoomed in on the MPSetup.log (located in %programfiles%\Microsoft Configuration Manager\logs) and there were the following lines:

<06-24-2009 19:53:49> checking WebDAV configurations
<06-24-2009 19:53:52>  WebDAV settings is not setup appropriately
<06-24-2009 19:53:52>  [Allow property queries with infinite depth] should be true (true)
<06-24-2009 19:53:52>  [Allow Custom Properties] should be false (true)
<06-24-2009 19:53:52>  [Allow anonymous property queries] should be true (true)
<06-24-2009 19:53:52>  Allow [All users read access to All content] authoring rule should exist (exist)

Which was really strange, because according to my IIS Manager>WebDAV Authoring Rules>WebDAV Settings, Allow Custom Properties was set to false…. eeeh what the hell?
I googled around and found out the following, the IIS console doesnt always update the webDAV configuration file correctly…. so I edited the config file manually.

C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv\config\schema\WEBDAV_schema.xml
I found the following lines:

<element name="properties">
<attribute name="allowAnonymousPropfind" type="bool" defaultValue="true" />
<attribute name="allowInfinitePropfindDepth" type="bool" defaultValue="true" />
<attribute name="allowCustomProperties" type="bool" defaultValue="true" />

and changed them to:

<element name="properties">
<attribute name="allowAnonymousPropfind" type="bool" defaultValue="true" />
<attribute name="allowInfinitePropfindDepth" type="bool" defaultValue="true" />
<attribute name="allowCustomProperties" type="bool" defaultValue="false" />

Then I restarted the IIS service, and after that I restarted the SMS_SITE_COMPONENT_MANGER service from within the ConfigMgr Service Manager (located under the Tools node). After that my Management Point played nicely

Custom SCCM context menu’s

How to make custom actions on resource objects within the SCCM console.

1) browse to %Program Files%\Microsoft Configuration Manager\AdminUI\XMLStorage\Extensions\Actions

2) create a folder with name: 7ba8bf44-4035-bdb4-16630291dcf6

3) place your custom actions XML within this folder

Here's some sample XML:

<ActionDescription Class="Executable" Displayname="Do Something Cool" MnemonicDisplayName="Script" Description="Something Cool">

<Executable>

<FilePath>wscript.exe</FilePath>

<Parameters>%TEMP%\Helloworld.vbs</Parameters>

</Executable>

</ActionDescription>

For a complete reference of possibilities, download the SCCM SDK here