MECM & Intune Lab Links

-

 ‘Twas the night before #MMSMOA, when all thro’ the house, all sorts of nerdy creatures were stirring, especially a mouse. Hundreds of lucky attendees and speakers were giddy with excitement. What will we learn? Who will we meet? For some it’s their first time, for others it’s a family reunion. But one thing is certain. This is the biggest tech event of the year for all things endpoint management. A huge thank you to all the sponsors for making this event happen, especially Patch My PC for their continuous support of our profession and for their commitment to making the best damn patching product you could ever ask for!

Let’s cut to the chase. DON’T F***ING TEST IN PRODUCTION THIS WEEK!!! You’ll make a lifetime of connections at an event like this, and you’ll also see a lifetime of shiny cool tricks all in 4 jam packed days of beer drinking and learning. USE A LAB! This week does not need to be a resume generating week. And if you’re not at MMS, you should still setup a lab just so you can try all the cool things you see on your Twitter feed.

Straight from the horse’s mouth, we have a great write up from Microsoft on how to configure a lab for testing out all the cool things you’ll hear from MMS. Microsoft Endpoint Manager evaluation lab kit now available as free download - Microsoft Tech Community

If you want to get a fully functioning Windows 11 based MECM lab and an Intune preview so you can do everything, go to Microsoft Endpoint Manager Evaluation Lab Kit | Microsoft Evaluation Center. You can also find links to the latest production and TP builds of MECM at this link for those of you that still think you have time to build it from scratch. It's worth noting that as of publishing time, the evaluation kits expire on Friday, May 6th. So this apparently isn't the best timing on Microsoft's part, but it will get us through MMS. The Windows 10 lab in the next paragraph expires 10 days later on May 16th.

If you want to pick from a Windows 10 lab versus a Windows 11 lab, you can visit an older download link. Windows 11 and Office 365 Deployment Lab Kit | Microsoft Evaluation Center. Yes, the link says Windows 11, but if you scroll on this page, you’ll get options for Windows 10 as well.

Want to add 1,000 fake clients to your brand-new lab? Check out Ryan Ephgrave’s (Twitter @EphingPosh) CMMessaging on GitHub at https://github.com/Ryan2065/CMMessaging. 

And if you're going to MMS, don't forget to swing by all the sponsor booths to say hi and score some swag. Rumor has it that Patch My PC has so much swag that they rented a trailer and had to get a suite just to have room for all of it! Drink responsibly my friends!



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CMPivot to check Services and start them (with a little help)

-
Image
Have you ever needed to get a really fast real-time look at if a service is running on a set of servers or workstations? Open CMPivot against a collection, type in your query, and send it. Seconds later you get real-time answers to your query for any online device. Queries for CMPivot run on 42 devices at once, until all devices you're querying have responded.  The last time my organization did server updates, I (and a trusty super awesome coworker) had to verify if a couple of SQL services were running on a small collection of servers. As we were manually checking these one by one, I came up with the idea that it would be incredibly helpful to use CMPivot.  The below query in CMPivot will return all devices where a SERVICE with the name containing SQL is NOT RUNNING and the service's start type is AUTO. In other words, if a service with SQL in the same is supposed to be automatically running and it's not, this query tells us. Service | where Name contains 'sql' ...
Read more

Run Scripts with Parameters in MEMCM (R.I.P. SCCM)

-
Image
How do you use Parameters in MEMCM's (R.I.P. SCCM) Run Scripts? How do you use Parameters on the Run Scripts  feature? You get three guesses, but the first two don't count. That's right, you create a script with standard PowerShell Parameters and you build it out in MEMCM. In your MEMCM console, navigate to Software Library > Overview > Scripts. If you're not familiar with Run Scripts  in MEMCM, check out my previous Blog articles on it. Click on Create Script . In the Create Script Wizard  that pops up input a Script Name , pick between PowerShell or PowerShell in your Script Language , import or paste in your script with Parameters, and click on Next . My demo script for this article ( scroll alllll the way down, it's at the bottom ) is about an 8 out of 10 on the cool factor, and about a 3 out of 10 on the usefulness factor. Long story short, the script will make a computer talk. There are two Parameters that you can input, one for "what do y...
Read more

SCCM CMPivot and Run Scripts

-
Image
What is CMPivot? What are Scripts? Why do I care about either of them? I recently attended MMS 2019 and took a great session from Jason Sandys and Tom Degreef on CMPivot and Run Scripts. They dove deep into the technical aspects of both of these somewhat new "fast channel" features of SCCM. Full disclaimer: I do not know everything and I may occasionally not know as much as you. Test everything you see here on a LAB environment and make sure you fully understand it. If you have any suggestions for improving this post, please feel free to drop a comment and I'll give you some kudos for your edit. Over simplified, CMPivot is a near real-time (not milliseconds, but usually seconds, and definitely no more than a few minutes) way to query information about your systems. You can find out literally anything about any system within your reach. Scripts pairs nicely with CMPivot because it is a real-time way to run scripts against your query results, or just another old col...
Read more