Sorry for not blogging, its been "too much work and no play" the last couple of months, but thats about to change!

First up this year will be this manual for the Notify installer that is built in C# (on the 3.5 version) to support ConfigMgr in handling notifications to end users during installations. The program has emerged from different customer implementations and is provided “AS-IS” with no support or guarantees. So please be advised to test this application in your test environment before putting it in production.

The application is similar to other projects like:

• SMS Notify (http://www.myitforum.com/articles/2/view.asp?id=7169)
• CoreTech´s Shutdown Util (http://blog.coretech.dk/kea/configuration-manager-shutdown-utility/)
• miniNotify (http://myitforum.com/cs2/files/folders/utilities/entry114775.aspx)

Background

One of the reasons for this project was the need for the ability to change language in the UI of the program, which was not fully possible with the miniNotify application that the customer evaluated. During the project other needs were detected and these extended features were implemented as well. These include:

• Detect if a user id logged on,if not the application terminates directly.
• Check which program is about to run and publish it to the UI (Read from ConfigMgr Client Class)
• Detect if any programs scheduled for upgrade are running and if so, notify users to shut them down.

Figure 1 - The user interface (UI)

 Files

The implementation is pretty straight forward and you can start with implementing the program to your ConfigMgr environment as a separate program (it can also be bundled with existing applications). The files contained with the notify program are:

• Notify.exe – The program itself.
• Configuration.xml – Configuration file with all the properties.
• Logo.png – The logo presented in the UI (see Figure 1, here it´s {FileMilk} installer).
• Notify.ico – The icon presented in the taskbar (see Figure 3).

Configuration

The configuration file (Configuration.xml) can be edited:

Figure 2 - The Configuration.xml opened in Internet Explorer.

The first properties that start with “Prg…”, it´s what printed in the UI, the “Install” is what is printed in the options below the info text.

All the “Time…” properties are the time that will be posted default and the dropdownlist values presented to the user. All timevalues are set in minutes.

All the “Notify” properties refer to the Balloon notification that will pop up, and the option NotifyPopupTime, is when the application will re-notify the user before the installation starts (in Figure 2 set to 10 min).

Figure 3 - Balloon popup in the taskbar.

The final “Open” properties are for the notification that refers to open programs.

Figure 4 - Notify users when applications that are being upgraded are open.

ConfigMgr preparations

In ConfigMgr, you can add all the sourcefiles to your existing packages and add a program for the notify handling. Or you can put the files in your desktop image and trigger notify over local path on the targeting systems. On the running program for the Notify runtime itself, the options of allowing the user to interact with the program must be set:

Figure 5

And also the maximum runtime allowed must be set greater than the time options before the application should timeout:

Figure 6

Finally you must configure the actual program that should have the notification before its installation:

Arguments

You can start the notify.exe runtime with two parameters in the following examples: 

• Notify.exe /GetAdvert – Gets the local running program that is about to install through ConfigMgr, this overwrites the option PrgLine2 in the Configuration.xml, if you want to run this before a TaskSequence it´s recommended not to use this option because its written “*” in the local WMI class on the agent.
• Notify.exe /ChkProcess:<process>;”Process Name description” – This option check if there is any open process that’s need to be shut down before the installation starts. This option can check for more than one application. To test this, you can start Internet Explorer and a CMD then run the notify application like the example: Notify.exe /ChkProcess:iexplorer;”Internet Explorer”;cmd;”Command promt”
  This will start the Notify application and check for both Internet Explorer and if a Commandpromt is running on the system and warn the user like in Figure 4. Note: After the option /ChkProcess there is a “:” sign, and between all the process and descriptions there are “;” sign!

The files for the program can be downloaded here:

Notify_1.7.01.zip (68.83 kb)

Have you always been annoyed by the default collections cluttering up the view in your ConfigMgr console, well there’s a way that you can store them away under a separate collection. I found this blog post (http://verbalprocessor.com/2009/03/20/how-to-move-collections-in-configmgr) a while ago solving the problem. But hey I’m a lazy guy and after all, I’m installing lots of ConfigMgr servers out at customer sites, so automation is the key that drives lazy admins, right? So in this post I will walk you through using a script that can move collections based on either the name or comment of the collection/collections you want to move.

First up, you need to know some stuff from your environment, like the name of your server and site code. Also you need to know the Collection ID where you want to save the collection to. Start out by going to your ConfigMgr console and locate the site code, you will find it here:

Then create a new collection and localize the Collection ID, like this: 

Next up download the script (from the bottom of this post) and save it to an appropriate location on your site server, in this case I saved it to the location F:\UTV\Scripts. Then edit the section with site server (I run it on the ConfigMgr server so the name is set to ".") and site code plus the Collection ID of your newly created collection in the script. Also, in this case I will move the collection based on the name they have, so in the script I enter “All%”, which basically means all collections that starts with All… something.  

Start an elevated CMD prompt and run the script like below: 

Your output should look similar to this:

Finally refresh you console and your should end up like this:

Hope this help, you can also move collection based on comments just edit the beginning of the script something like this (based on the fact that you have collections with comment like Move).  

The script can be downloaded here:

MoveCollections1.0.zip (1.11 kb)

Please enjoy!