Support Tool for Windows Intune is now avalable for both SCCM+Intune AND Intune Standalone service

If you are a Windows Intune user you probably know that to be able to test managing Windows Phone 8 you need a special certificate from Symantec and to get this you also need to have a special Windows Phone developer account. This has been a lot of hassle for people that just want to test the functionally or to demo it. In May Microsoft released a “Support tool” that included a presigned Company Portal that you could install and upload in SCCM and you were all set to start testing enrolling Windows Phones. The problem were that this support tool only worked if you used SCCM+Intune, not if you were a user of the Standalone Window Intune service. The good news is that from today, the Support Tools also work for everyone that want to test Windows Phone 8 management in Windows Intune Standalone service.

Here is the basic steps

• Log in to your Windows Intune Trial account via http://manage.microsoft.com
• Install the MSI that you download from Microsoft Download Center It will extract the sample SSP.xap and other sample xap files included in the MSI. The default location for the files is “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Support Tool for Windows Intune Trial management of Windows Phone 8\” Note: The support tool included in the package is not needed for Windows Intune administrators. It is required for only Microsoft System Center 2012 Configuration Manager Administrators.
• Navigate to "Administration -> Mobile Device Management -> Windows Phone 8". As stated in the text (see below, go directly to step 5

• Upload the SSP.xap. Windows Intune Software Publisher will be launched.

• In Software Setup page, leave the checkbox “Use the Company Portal App file signed by the sample Symantec code-signing certificate” checked.

• Specify the location of software setup files by pointing to the SSP.xap that you’ve downloaded and extracted on your local machine
• Click on next to complete the rest of the steps to publish the app
• After completion of the steps above, Windows Intune Windows Phone Trial account enrollment is enabled and you should be able to start enrolling your Windows Phone devices through your trial account.
• Deploy the sample apps provided in this package as appropriate

• Users will now be able to enroll their WP8 device and could browse the deployed sample apps in their SSP.

To  enroll a Windows Phone 8, follow the below steps

• On the Phone, go to Settings and select “Company Portal”
• Click “Add account”

• Add your account name and password

• If everything works you should get a confirmation that the account has been added. Make sure to select to install the company portal

• Your device is now added and can be managed from Windows Intune (can take a couple of minutes until you can see it in the console

MVP renewal – 2013

Today I got my MVP renewal letter that informed me that I was re-awarded as Most Valuable Professional and therefore receiving the Microsoft MVP – System Center Cloud and Datacenter Management award for the 7th year in a row for doing a great job in serving the community by helping out the community.

New Community Effort! Whiteboard Wednesday

My friend Maarten Goet, a System Center Cloud and Datacenter Management MVP in Netherland has started a new cool community effort – Whiteboard Wednesday

The goal is to provide visitors every Wednesday with a 5-minute video where a community experts draws out how a certain technology or feature on the Cloud OS (Hyper-V, System Center, Azure) works, with some narration, as if it were on a whiteboard.

First video is online: www.whiteboardwednesday.nl

Update Rollup 2 (UR2) for Virtual Machine Manager 2012 SP1 require some extra attention

Microsoft released UR2 for System Center 2012Sp1 a while and as you know you can download the updates rollups from the Microsoft Update Catalog, or you can configure WSUS/SCCM to handle the update.

Usually the process to update the components is very easy but it appears that the previous update (UR1) for SCVMM2012SP1 component has a issue that blocks a “normal” update with UR2.

Below is the statement from the System Center team or you can read the whole blog post:

Important actions for Update Rollup 2 for System Center 2012 SP1- Virtual Machine Manager

In order to install Update Rollup 2 package for System Center 2012 SP1-  Virtual Machine Manager, you will need to uninstall Update Rollup 1 for System Center SP1 – Virtual Machine Manager package from your system. 

- If you download Update Rollup 2 package for System Center 2012 SP1 Virtual Machine Manager from Microsoft Update Catalog and install Update Rollup 2 without un-installing Update Rollup 1  you should un-install Update Rollup 2 package for Virtual Machine Manager and then un-install Update Rollup 1 for System Center 2012 SP1 – Virtual Machine Manager via control panel. 

- If you are using WSUS to update System Center 2012 SP1 – Virtual Machine Manager and you have already installed Update Rollup 1 for System Center 2012 SP1 – Virtual Machine Manager then you will not receive Update Rollup 2 notification until Update Rollup 1 is uninstalled.

Why is this necessary?

When Update Rollup 2 is applied to a system which is running System Center 2012 SP1 Virtual Machine Manager with UR1, the installer does not patch files correctly. This is caused by the way UR 1 was packaged. As such the product fixes in UR1 are correct; it is the packaging of UR1 that causes this issue. If you do not need UR2, then you should continue to operate with UR1.   However, if you choose to stay on Update Rollup 1 for System Center 2012 SP1 Virtual Machine Manager and a later Update Rollup is released that you need to implement you will still need to remove Update Rollup 1 first.

We apologize for any inconvenience this causes your organization.  We have performed root cause analysis on the issue and have processes in place to prevent future recurrences of this situation. 

Windows Server/System Center MVP Speaker Series

Don’t miss this -  Starting in April, 2013 MVP’s share their knowledge on a variety of topics to the broader community.

If you are interested in attending these online meetings, which will take place once a week, please follow this link where you can add all the meeting invites to your calendar and listen in and participate.

Each presentation will be recorded and available later for viewing if there is an instance where you are unable to tune into the meeting on the actual date.

Microsoft Lync is required in order to “attend” these on-line meetings.  If you need to install Lync, you may do so from here.

New updates to SCOM 2012

It’s time to plan for some maintenance, Microsoft just release updates for your System Center Products.

If you still run System Center 2012 RTM (without SP1) – Update Rollup 5 For System Center 2012 RTM Is Available

If you run the latest and greatest System Center SP1 – Update Rollup 2 For System Center 2012 SP1 Is Available

You can now connect your System Center Advisor to SCOM 2012

A lot of new information about System Center Advisor. Two weeks ago Microsoft announced that System Center Advisor is free for everyone to use. At MMS the next announcement arrived – You can now get the alerts from System Center Advisor directly in SCOM 2012 with the new connector

Note that the connector is still a PREVIEW version so this is not something you should use in your production environment. To install it you also need the SCOM 2012 SP1 CU2 installed

New and updated MP’s

The last weeks Microsoft released some new and updated management packs

System Center Management Pack for Windows 8 Client Operating System

Feature Summary

• Key Processor Performance Indicators
• Logical and Physical disk performance and free space
• Memory utilization
• Network health
• Health monitoring of key Windows Operating System services
• Comprehensive performance collections
• Availability and event reports

System Center Monitoring Pack for Microsoft Application Virtualization Server 5.0

Feature Summary

• Discovery of the Application Virtualization 5.0 Services: Management, Publishing, Reporting
• Alerts indicating availability/configuration/security issues that require administrative intervention
• Collection Rules defined for significant events in ETW logs of each App-V 5.0 Service
• Verification that dependent NT services are running
• Notification of security issues involving admin access attempts, admin added/deleted on App-V 5.0 Management Server

System Center Management Pack for Windows Azure Fabric – Preview

The Management Pack for Windows Azure Fabric enables you to monitor the availability and performance of Azure fabric resources that are running on Windows Azure. The management pack runs on a specified proxy agent and then uses various Windows Azure APIs to remotely discover and collect instrumentation information about a specified Windows Azure resource, such as a Cloud Service, Storage or Virtual Machine. The Management Pack for Windows Azure Fabric provides no functionality on import. For each Windows Azure subscription that contains Azure resources you want to monitor, you must configure discovery and monitoring by first using the Windows Azure wizard in the administration section of the OM Console, then the Windows Azure Monitoring template in the authoring section of the OM Console.

System Center Management Pack for Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Parallel Data Warehouse Appliance

Feature Summary
The following list gives an overview of the features of this management pack for PDW Appliance. Refer to the Management Pack for SQL Server 2012 PDW Appliance guide for more details.

• Discovers SQL Server PDW Appliances, including the hardware manufacturer.
• Monitors both hardware and software components of SQL Server PDW Appliance. This includes:
  • The ability to roll up the overall health information across hardware and software components.
  • The ability to detect and monitor nodes that belong to different SQL Server PDW failover clusters.
  • Custom diagram view to visually represent the PDW appliance hierarchy comprising of hardware and software components. This includes these three views:
    • Appliance view – high level health information of the overall appliance health and their individual nodes
    • Appliance nodes – view to represent the health of each of the nodes and their roles.
    • Alerts view –view for the IT operator to look at proactive monitoring alerts and take appropriate actions.
• Custom e-mail template to provide more detailed information regarding the alerts.
• Tasks to integrate with the various PDW admin console views.
• Run-as profile to securely connect to PDW appliance for discovery and monitoring.

System Center Management Pack for Windows Server DNS

Overview

The System Center Management Pack for Windows Server DNS monitors DNS health, availability, configuration, security, and zone-transfer issues on DNS servers running the Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008, 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2012 operating systems.

Note This Management Pack is intended to completely replace the functionality of the previous DNS Management Pack, and as such it is not backwards compatible with them. The old and new management packs can live side-by-side, so you can uninstall the old MP’s if/when you are comfortable with the new Management Pack.

Best of MMS 2013 – Stockholm, Sweden

On the 16th of May Best of MMS 2013 will take place in Stockholm,Sweden (in Swedish). 16 sessions and three different tracks will be available!!

It is being arranged by Truesec, Microsoft and Lumagate, you can find all the details and registration information here: http://events.truesec.se/Event/Best_of_MMS_2013

I gotten the opportunity to do one presentation:

Managing IOS, WP8, WIN RT using CM and Intune, together with Jörgen Nilsson from Onevinn

I am really looking forward to it!
Don’t miss it!

System Center Advisor is now a FREE service

System Center Advisor is a service that has been around since early 2012. When released it was free for customer with Software Assurance but yesterday Microsoft announced that wit is now free for everyone.

What is System Center Advisor – It’s a cloud service that helps you track changes and configurations for Microsoft server software. The infrastructure is build on System Center Operations Manager agent and management packs but not that it is not a real time monitoring solution.

Advisor supports analysis of the following workloads:

• Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2:
  • Active Directory
  • Hyper-V Host
  • General operating system
• SQL Server 2008 and later
  • SQL Engine
• Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and later
• Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 and later
• Microsoft Lync Server 2010

If you read the Microsoft announcement on the System Center engineering blog it looks like we will see some more announcements at MMS 2013