Northwest System Center User Group

NWSCUG Meeting on August 21st!

Posted on August 6, 2015 by Greg Ramsey

The next NWSCUG meeting is Friday, August 21st at 10:00 am at the Civica Building in Bellevue, WA. Below is the agenda. We’re looking forward to seeing you there!

10:00 – System Orchestrator, SMA, and Azure Automation – Right tool for the Job by Ravi
11:15 – System Center Orchestrator Integration Packs from Kelverion
12:15 – Lunch (Sponsored by Kelverion)
12:45 – Windows 10 Servicing, and Windows as a Service by Michael Niehaus
2:30 – Moderated Discussion
3:00 – Close – Raffle for free pass to MMS 2015!

Free pass for MMS 2015! We’ll be giving away a free pass to MMS 2015 (Minneapolis, MN, Nov 9-11). This is for a complimentary registration (valued at $1,499 regular price).

Please note that we are adding a session to our lineup – Moderated Discussion. At our meetings, we have had a great lineup of presentations from industry speakers, as well as from Microsoft – now we want to add more community involvement. Attending a user group meeting is more than just listening to presentations. It’s also about getting to know others in the room, sharing war stories, networking, and helping each other out. We want to get our attendees networking more, so we want to try something new. In the moderated discussion, we’ll agree on some topics to discuss, split into smaller groups to discuss among yourselves, and then recap discussions with the larger group. I think this helps us learn from each other, and build lasting relationships (personally, my last two jobs have been a result of networking in user groups).

Ravi Kiran Chintalapudi is from the Cloud and Data Center Management Product Group at Microsoft, and will dive into these three tools, and help us understand the right tool for the job. Also, based on the conversation, he will dive deeper into the tools to demonstrate real-world scenarios.

Michael Niehaus is back for another great session on Windows Deployment and Management. This session will focus on Windows 10, and understanding how servicing works for the Consumer as well as the Enterprise. He’ll dive deeply into pros/considerations for Current Branch (CB), Current Branch for Business (CBB), and the Long Term Servicing Branch (LTSB). He will also discuss Windows as a Service, and strategies for your enterprise.

Our Presenters:

Michael Niehaus – Senior Product Marketing Manager, Windows Commercial Business

Michael Niehaus is a senior product marketing manager at Microsoft, responsible for helping enterprise IT pros with Windows deployment, Windows RT, and Windows manageability needs. Prior to joining the Windows Commercial team, Michael was a longtime program manager and developer for the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, having joined Microsoft in 2004 after spending 14 years working in enterprise IT.

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Save the Date – August 21st for our next meeting!

Posted on July 20, 2015 by Greg Ramsey

The title says it all. Our next meeting will be August 21st. We’re still finalizing the agenda and sponsors, and hope to open registration this week. If there is specific content that you would like to see, or if you would like to present, please contact us at board@nwscug.org.

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NWSCUG July 2015 Meeting Recap

Posted on July 20, 2015 by Greg Ramsey

First things first – Download the content and watch the video – if you use ConfigMgr, you need this 90 minute deep dive on content.

A big thanks to everyone who attended our July meeting. We received great feedback from the sessions, and gave away some great books from Kent Agerlund and Johan Arwidmark. Parallels demonstrated their product to enable you to easily manage Macs with ConfigMgr.

Register for MMS 2015 – In case you missed the memo, MMS 2015 (Nov 9-11, Minneapolis MN) registration is open. The early bird registration is only $599, and ends on July 27th. This is a great conference, full of deep dives and networking opportunities. Please consider joining us at MMS 2015.

New Easy Setup for Onsite Configuration Manager – Sangee and Kerim discussed how ConfigMgr upgrade and setup will be evolving to meet the rapid pace of Cloud-Based Devices, as well as the new cadence of Windows 10 releases. As you know, all of these devices update (and provide new features) multiple times a year, so ConfigMgr needs to be more agile to support these features – customers can’t wait until the next major or minor revision of ConfigMgr. This new easy setup will extend/improve the current experience that we have with enabling Intune extensions. This was more of a Q&A session, primarily gathering feedback on the audience for how we currently handle upgrade and install, and where we have pain points. Give your feedback on http://configurationmanager.uservoice.com. Keep that url handy – that’s what we should all use for submitting feature requests, as well as voting up others feature requests. This helps the product team understand our biggest pain points, and helps them prioritize. In fact, I submitted two today (check here and here). Take a look, and if you agree with the value, consider casting one (or more) of your votes.

Deep Dive – Understanding Content – This was another great session, led by Kerim, Prasanna and Bippen from Microsoft. You need to watch the video and download the slides. Anyone who has worked with ConfigMgr has struggled to understand how content is distributed to DPs and downloaded from clients (present company definitely included). The team did an outstanding job describing the difference between DP types, potential bottlenecks, and diving deep into understand workflow between provider, distmgr, sender, scheduler, and pkgxfermgr, as well as troubleshooting and understanding the client-side process. They also discussed the content management utilities that are part of the ConfigMgr 2012 R2 Toolkit:

Content Library Explorer – Helps viewing and troubleshooting issues with the content library on DPs
DP Job Manager – Helps manage ongoing distribution jobs to DPs
Content Library Transfer Tool – Helps consolidate or move content library from one drive to another

One hot tip that I learned at the session is that when using Pull DPs, set the priority of the source DPs to a higher priority (a lower number) than the destination/child DP (view blog post for how to do this). You want to always ensure that the source DP has the content first.

The team also answered a lot of questions from the audience, and collected a lot of feedback around our thoughts for how to improve content management, and the admin experience.

Remember to watch the video and download the slides. You won’t be disappointed.

Greg