Post MSIgnite 2018 – What I’m Watching

As I filtered through the 1700+ sessions leading up to Microsoft Ignite, I quickly knew that unless I was able to clone myself I would have some catching up to do.  Rather than try to sort through all of the sessions again later, I made a playlist of sessions that I’d like to go back and watch.

The playlist is a compilation of 70+ videos and 24+ hours of content, mostly in the Azure and Office 365 arena since that is where a lot of my focus is these days.  Is there a session that shouldn’t be missed?  Feel free to let me know what should be added!

ConfigMgr 1702 Rollup Update Deployment Gotchas

Microsoft released a Rollup Update for Configuration Manager v1702 this week to address multiple issues.  One specific issue that affected many deployments was related to operating system deployment:

Starting with System Center Configuration Manager, version 1702, unknown computers that are started from media or PXE may not find task sequences targeted to them. This issue may occur if the Previous button on the “Select a task sequence to run” page is selected on the unknown computer.

There are already great examples of how to install this update, but there are a couple of key gotchas I ran into during deployment.

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Granting Permissions to Create Power Management Report Subscriptions in SCCM

With the role based administration controls (RBAC) in SCCM 2012 and above, a common way to grant access to reporting is using the built-in security role Read-Only Analyst.  This role grants access to view Configuration Manager objects, but also to run reports.  However, it does not grant permission to create subscriptions to these reports.  Subscription permissions are tied to other built-in roles.  For example, adding the Operating System Deployment Manager security role to a user would add the ability to create subscriptions to reports about OSD.  The only built-in role that grants permission to schedule Power Management reports, though is the Operations Administrator role.  Using custom permissions, we can grant the ability to create a subscription for all reports including Power Management.  These custom permissions will still honor any Security Scopes and Collections that are assigned to the Administrative User. Continue reading

SCCM Client Stuck in Provisioning Mode

I was recently called to investigate an issue with failed client installations on newly imaged Windows 10 machines.  The symptoms were as follows:

  • Opening Configuration Manager from the Control Panel of the affected computer is missing tabs.  Typically only the General, Components, Actions, Site, Cache, and Network tabs are displayed.
  • The tabs that are displayed in Configuration Manager on the computer are incomplete as well.

ProvisioningMode

  • The registry key HKLM\Software\Microsoft\CCM\CcmExec\ProvisioningMode is set to True

Regedit Provisioing mode SCCM 2012 client

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