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So Today was a good day! I am right now sitting in the San Antonio airport waiting on a flight back home to Denver, but earlier today I got a chance to take a tour of the Microsoft Datacenter in the area! This opportunity was part of a joint event between Catapult Systems and Microsoft around Cloud Services. I spoke about Office 365 and the journey to the cloud, and a Microsoft Azure specialist ta...

During a recent discussion on OpsMgr 2007 R2 environments, I was told that OpsMgr subscriptions do not fire for sub-group members. I decided to test this and see if this works the same way in OpsMgr 2012. To test this I created a total of three groups: A top level one called “Top Level Group”  with no members. A second group called “Sub-Group1” with one computer object and a third computer group c...

Background: Operations Manager has a feature which alerts which a monitor has exceeded a certain threshold for processor utilization and processor queue. If you use Health Explorer you can see what processes were occurring when the processor went to an unhealthy state. I discussed this concept and other Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) in a Windows IT Pro article available at: http://www.windows...

Problem: We have legacy Alert Generating Event Collection rules that legitimately create alerts so that a particular group gets notified of changes to security accounts and groups in Active Directory.  In hind sight they should have been TIMER RESET event Monitors, but there are so many of these rules that it would be a significant undertaking to convert them all (read that as re-create as Timer r...

There are many Windows 7 deployment projects out there and recently I had a request to compose an Aero theme as the default background for a Windows 7 image. This post will discuss how we did this and the necessary steps to deploy an Aero themed desktop. Please remember to always plan and test accordingly to verify your OSD plan will work successfully. Window 7 Aero I must admit that I really di...

Summary: Operator role and higher (operator, advanced operator, and administrator) should be able to put systems into maintenance mode. My testing: For due diligence I tested this in my lab environment as well for the Administrator role, Operator Role and Read-Only Operator Role and the results are shown below. Administrator: (Maintenance mode is available) Operator: (Maintenance mode is avai...

Our Federal practice just closed a huge deal resulting in $160,000 new CRM licenses for a government entity. Way to go, Federal! The client wanted to replace the legal case management system that they used for Correspondence Tracking. Their primary concern was integration with Outlook to simplify the end user's interaction with the application and the ability to cost effectively meet the require...

Today's Win story highlights our San Antonio infrastructure practice. Watch the video to see more! Rush Enterprises Drives Dramatic IT Performance Increase with System Center ?Rush Enterprises operates the largest network of heavy and medium-duty truck dealerships in North America and a construction equipment dealership in Houston, Texas. Struggling to support a growing organization and geogra...

Yesterday Microsoft released Rollup 1 for System Center 2012. SC 2012 RU1 RU1 includes fixes/features for VMM, App controller, and Operations Manager.  For OpsManager it’s notable that support for Solaris 11 Cross Platform agents was added.  While Microsoft is titling the KB Update Rollup 1 for System Center, there are separate download links if you just want VMM. or OpsManager, or App Controlle...