blogs.catapultsystems.com

Have you ever heard the saying, "One picture is worth a ten thousand words"?1 In the realm of requirements management, a single picture or diagram can support numerous verbose textual requirements and convey a concept to the reader in a quick glance without requiring lengthy description. One of the most useful diagraming tools that can be employed by a business analyst in the early phases of a project is the context diagram. The International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA) defines a context diagram as "a top-level data flow diagram. It uses a single data process to describe the scope and shows the external entities and data stores that provide data to and receive data from the system."2 Benefits of the context diagram are: Easily understood by non-techni...

Have you ever wondered why a ConfigMgr client takes a long time to run the advertised programs after you deploy this client using ConfigMgr OSD? Well, this is because as soon as the machine is imaged, it gets added to the ‘All Systems’ collection and gets the advertisements/policies that are targeted to the All Systems collection. But what if your advertisements are not targeted to the default All Systems collection, and instead are targeted to a custom query based collection? In that case, the newly imaged machine doesn’t get added to the custom collection until it sends the inventory AND the collection updates based on its schedule and finds the machines that fulfill the query condition to add the machine(s) to the collection, and in turn triggering the creation of policies for these cl...

The following is a list of known issues that relate to UDI deployments: · If you receive error 404.3 when browsing to the UDI Designer web service, this error is typically the result of the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) multipurpose Internet mail extensions (MIME) type not being registered correctly. To register the WCF MIME type on the web server, go to %Windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.0\Windows Communication Foundation. From an elevated command prompt, run ServiceModelReg.exe –I to register the MIME type for the .svc extension, which the web service requires. · When you use an x64 boot image for operating system deployments, the status background bitmap will not be displayed in the Windows PE environment. · To install language packs, you must configure the list of languag...

This information is provided as-is, you at your own risk. Updated my HTA for creating AD groups and collections with a few tweaks and wanted to post the new version.  I originally blogged an older version here.  I had taken an HTA from SMSUtils and heavily modified it to do what I needed.  I have since updated it with some additional appearance changes, and the big change is that I added support for R3’s “Dynamically Add New Resources” to the collection.  You can now select that as an option to set when creating collections. Update V1.4: Some other formatting changes were made as well. New support for ConfigMgr R3: I also tweaked the logging window so that it’ll automatically scroll as you create multiple entries.  I hope you find this tool as useful as I ha...

We recently found that a server in our environment was experiencing disk corrupt issues but we were not being notified of the condition by Operations Manager. Digging into the Operating System management pack, there is a rule (NTFS – File System Corrupt) which finds event #41 in the system log. From the product knowledge, we see that either event ID 41 or event ID 55 indicate potential error conditions: Based upon the expression found for the rule this would not catch the event #55 we are seeing. As a workaround to resolve this we created a new rule which matched the condition we are looking for (event #55 from source of NTFS in the System log). We configured the alerting level to medium priority, warning severity and suppressed duplicates based upon the logging computer. Fo...

After installing ConfigMgr, what’s the first thing to check out: the console of course. So here is a whirlwind tour of new and notable things. First off of course is the fact that the console is not an MMC snap-in. This should bring cheers from all who have ever used the MMC. It’s not so much that the MMC is bad, it’s just that it wasn’t well suited to administering ConfigMgr. Things like no auto-refresh, the annoying action pane, limited drag and drop, etc. And of course the many crashes. The ConfigMgr team tried valiantly (IMO) to battle these things, but for a lot of different reasons, the MMC snap-in just left a lot to be desired. In v.Next, ConfigMgr has moved to the System Center unified framework for the console. This doesn’t mean all System Center products will use the same ins...

We started receiving this message recently on one of our Operations Manager administrator consoles. The message came from a system where this has previously been working. The message was “Failed to launch Microsoft Word. Please make sure Microsoft Word is installed. Here is the error message: The server threw an exception. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80010105 (RPC_E_SERVERFAULT)) It looks like kb2251419 is breaking the ability to edit company knowledge per the thread below: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/operationsmanagerauthoring/thread/b2c679f3-d971-4fc9-b07a-983bf95e8c7b Just posting this in case others are running into it!...

There is a way to access the K2 API from blackpoint, although I will make the disclaimer that this is not supported in blackpoint. I will go over the steps of calling the GoToActivity method of the API from a reference event within the K2 designer for K2 blackpoint. Within K2 designer, you will need to drag a reference event onto the workspace.   Configure an event name for the event, and after clicking next, you will come to a screen within the wizard to add a Constructor. The next wizard you will want to click the "Add Reference” button and browse to “C:\Program Files (x86)\K2 blackpoint\Bin\SourceCode.Workflow.Management.dll” (if using a 64bit server). Select this DLL and add it to the list of available managed process references.   Click finish and t...

Personal smartphones are becoming more and more common in business environments.  Companies have always struggled with managing who should have the ability to sync their phones and who can’t and what types of phones are allowed.  Exchange 2010 SP1 has made it very easy for the administrator (or any other appointed person) to approve or block specific users or phones from utilizing ActiveSync.  This post will not go into the specific feature policies, but will only examine connectivity policies. By default ActiveSync is enabled for everyone and every type of device.  Let’s start off by configuring all devices that attempt to connect via ActiveSync into a quarantine for administrator approval. From EMS we can run the following command to set the default access level to Quarantine for al...

The information provided in this post is provided as-is, this is most likely unsupported, proceed at your own risk. There are times when you may need to move the source files for your packages from one location to another.  Maybe your server is running low on space, or you just want to reorganize things a little bit.  Regardless, manually updating all of your packages with a new source would be a very tedious task.  Provided with this blog post is a script that will make the necessary changes and create a log file so you can easily see what was changed.  If you are the original creator of the script that I modified, thank you, as I’m not sure where I got the script from, it was something I had laying around and then I modified to take advantage of MDT’s logging capabilities. I’ve take...