Jason Sandys

Jason is a senior lead consultant for Catapult Systems and blogs about infrastructure topics with an emphasis on SCCM and operating system deployment. Jason is a MCSE and holds Microsoft certifications in server administration and SCCM.
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Sep2

ConfigMgr v.Next (Beta 1) – The Console

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 a...
Posted by Jason Sandys on Thursday, 2 Sep 2010 04:15.
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Aug28

ConfigMgr v.Next (Beta 1) - Setup

And next is actually running setup. There are lots of screenshots in this post with comments pointing out and clarifying changes in the setup and in v.Next in general. Running the installation is easily done by initialing the splash.hta from the media/source files. Most of the links don’t work yet in Beta 1 or just take you to the connect site. The only one I’m...
Posted by Jason Sandys on Saturday, 28 Aug 2010 04:30.
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Aug25

ConfigMgr v.Next (Beta 1) – Prerequisites

During server setup, I followed the TechNet guide for installing IIS on a 2008 or 2008 R2 server: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc431377.aspx. One important note is that I did not install (or configure) the WebDAV role service of IIS. The required WebDAV functionality is baked into v.Next where needed and thus this IIS component is not needed anymore. This goes a little against the g...
Posted by Jason Sandys on Wednesday, 25 Aug 2010 08:54.
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Aug22

ConfigMgr v.Next (Beta 1) – Schema Extensions

Although I played around with pre-Beta versions of ConfigMgr v.Next (at the MVP Summit and MMS), I haven’t really tried to learn v.Next … until now. This should be the first post of many documenting my observations and notes while installing, configuring, and testing my first v.Next lab. To start off with, I have two VMs: a DC and my ConfigMgr v.Next VM. Both are Windows Server 2008 R2. I’ll ad...
Posted by Jason Sandys on Sunday, 22 Aug 2010 11:18.
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Aug21

System Center Virtual User Group Presentation

As promised, here are the slides for my presentation at the System Center Virtual User Group on Friday, August 20th: http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/jsandys/Presentations/Software%20Updates.pdf....
Posted by Jason Sandys on Saturday, 21 Aug 2010 04:01.
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May28

Software Updates Management and Group Policy for ConfigMgr cont.

This post is a continuation of my previous post: http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/jsandys/archive/2010/05/09/software-update-management-and-group-policy-for-configmgr-what-else.aspx. So how do the rest of the settings in the Windows Updates Group Policy section affect Software Updates in ConfigMgr? The short answer is that they don’t. These settings effectively control how the Windows Update Agent...
Posted by Jason Sandys on Friday, 28 May 2010 11:28.
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May9

Software Update Management and Group Policy for ConfigMgr (what else?)

There is definitely a lot of confusion about how Group Policies interact with, control, and affect Software Update Management (SUM) on ConfigMgr clients. At the outset of this post (or series of posts), I don’t even know exactly what’s going to happen with some of the different settings and combinations that I’m going to try and then document. The Windows Update Agent The Windows Update Agent (...
Posted by Jason Sandys on Sunday, 9 May 2010 08:10.
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Apr22

Two Follow ups

From my presentation this morning at MMS I had two follow up questions that I promised to post links for. Well, here they are. The first link is for a failure in USMT after the installation of the hotfix described in KB article 974571: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=977203. The second link is to a post by Roger Zander that contains an exported task sequence snippet containing task steps to ...
Posted by Jason Sandys on Thursday, 22 Apr 2010 01:02.
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Apr5

Duplicate Drivers Helper Script

Importing duplicate drivers into Configuration Manager has adequately been covered by Johan and William Bracken. The process that both outline in their posts is simple and easy to implement but very time consuming if done manually on more than one or two system models. At a client recently, I whipped up a quick script to automate this process. @ECHO OFF for /f "tokens=*" %%G IN ...
Posted by Jason Sandys on Monday, 5 Apr 2010 01:05.
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Mar29

CTSMUG Presentation

Here is my slide deck from a ConfigMgr OSD 101 and Best Practices presentation I recently gave at the Central Texas Systems Management User Group (CTSMUG). CTSMUG is run by Greg Ramsey....
Posted by Jason Sandys on Monday, 29 Mar 2010 09:42.
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