The Mobile Device Manager Support Team Blog

Microsoft Enterprise Product Roadmap Webcast

J.C. Hornbeck — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 09:18:04 GMT

Please join us for a high level discussion into Microsoft software investments designed to cover most of the major product lines. This will be a 35,000 foot view into the following areas:

Windows Family
Virtualization
Office System
Unified Communications
IT Management
Security

This particular webcast is scheduled for Friday, January 20 at 1:00pm Pacific Time although others are scheduled as well. See this link for more information.

J.C. Hornbeck | System Center & Security Knowledge Engineer

Get the latest System Center news on Facebook and Twitter:

The Forefront Server Protection blog: https://blogs.technet.com/b/fss/
The Forefront Identity Manager blog : https://blogs.msdn.com/b/ms-identity-support/
The Forefront TMG blog: https://blogs.technet.com/b/isablog/
The Forefront UAG blog: https://blogs.technet.com/b/edgeaccessblog/

NOW LIVE: The Microsoft TechNet Gallery

J.C. Hornbeck — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 07:52:50 GMT

As many of you probably already know, for a long time the Script Repository (a special-purpose gallery) has been an engine of great content and community engagement on TechNet. Well starting last week it was upgraded significantly and launched as the new TechNet Gallery, supporting not only just scripts but many other technical resources for Microsoft products including App-V, Exchange, and System Center.

Also of note is that in addition to English, the new gallery is available in French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Italian, Korean, Czech, Polish, and Turkish. Individuals’ contributions and engagement with the TechNet Gallery are tracked in their TechNet profiles and fully integrated with our reputation system which is also fully localized.

If IT resources like scripts, management packs, utilities, and extensions are important for your success, you’ll definitely want to bookmark this one.

TechNet Gallery

J.C. Hornbeck | System Center Knowledge Engineer

System Center Unlimited - All your favorite System Center posts, together in one central place

J.C. Hornbeck — Thu, 12 May 2011 10:05:34 GMT

If you’ve been following the blogging efforts of the System Center support and product teams for any length of time then you know we have quite a few different blogs based on the technology or product we focus on. For example, we have the App-V blog, the DPM blog, the ConfigMgr 2007blog, Nexus SC plus many many more, and we do that because sometimes maybe you want DPM info but don’t care about App-V (or vice versa), but what if you’re like so many of our customers and actually do use most of the System Center products together and you want an easier way to track all the content we publish? Well that’s a common request that we get so I decided to setup a single site that mirrors all of the feeds from our most popular System Center sites all in one place. Now by subscribing to a single site you can get all of your favorite System Center content pushed right to your desktop. Here are the feeds I’m mirroring:

I named this blog System Center Unlimited mainly because that’s kind of what it is, an unlimited view into the official System Center universe, so if this sounds like something you’d like then check it out at the link below and let me know what you think:

https://blogs.technet.com/b/systemcentertech

And don’t forget, you can still get all this same information by following me on Twitter or by becoming a fan on Facebook.

Enjoy!

J.C. Hornbeck | System Center Knowledge Engineer

Meet a couple of our System Center engineers

J.C. Hornbeck — Wed, 11 May 2011 08:54:29 GMT

I just wanted to let you know about a couple of our System Center support engineers that were recently profiled on Microsoft’s Customer Service & Support (CSS) People First blog. There’s a chance that you might have talked with one of these guys if you’ve worked with any of our System Center products and needed to call us for help with an issue, so if you ever wondered what they look like or where they come from then here’s your chance. And even if you haven’t had the pleasure of working with either, they offer some great insight into what it’s like working in our CTS support organization and at Microsoft as a whole.

The first is Rich Pesenko, a Senior Support Escalation Engineer who specializes in Operations Manager and Mobile Device Manager: https://blogs.msdn.com/b/peoplefirst/archive/2011/04/20/profile-richard-presenko.aspx

Also profiled is our virtualization lead Steve Thomas (aka The Mad Virtualizer) who is also a Senior Support Escalation Engineer and he specializes in App-V, MED-V, VDI and SCVMM: https://blogs.msdn.com/b/peoplefirst/archive/2011/05/06/profile-steve-thomas.aspx

Enjoy!

J.C. Hornbeck | System Center Knowledge Engineer

The System Center Blog Aggregator app is now available on Android

J.C. Hornbeck — Tue, 10 May 2011 08:59:34 GMT

A few weeks back I announced the System Center Blog Aggregator app for Windows Phone 7 and today I wanted to let you know that it was now available for all you Android users out there as well. I won’t go into all the details as you can read that at the link above, but here are a couple screen shots to give you an idea of what it looks like. It’s essentially the same app except for the addition of the Nexus SC blog and the blog for Microsoft Server Application Virtualization. Look for the original Windows Phone 7 app to be updated shortly.

After you load and start The System Center Blog Aggregator you see the main screen that defaults to loading the Nexus SC System Center site:

From there you simply click the list button and you’ll see the option for all of our other blogs:

From there you can select and read any blog you like. So there you have it, an app that allows you to follow our content quickly and easily right on your Android phone. If you have an Android phone you should load up The System Center Blog Aggregator and check it out. It’s free after all so what do you have to lose? You can find it here.

Enjoy!

J.C. Hornbeck | System Center Knowledge Engineer

Quick Fix: You are unable to install the System Center Mobile Device Manager 2008 Admin Tools if Windows Powershell was upgraded

J.C. Hornbeck — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 06:46:16 GMT

Attempting to install the System Center Mobile Device Manager 2008 (SCMDM) Administrator Console or the Software Distribution console on a server or workstation fails with the following error:

Setup detected a missing prerequisite.

Windows PowerShell 1.0 or higher is required to install the Mobile Device Manager Management Console

and the Mobile Device Manager Software Distribution Console.

This error can occur even if Windows Powershell is installed on the server.

Cause

The Setup program looks in the following registry key to determine if Windows Powershell is installed:

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\PowerShell\1\PowerShellEngine\PowerShellVersion

If the registry value of PowerShellVersion is not 1.0, the Prerequisite checker will fail validation.

Resolution

Remove Powershell 2.0 from the server or workstation and install Powershell 1.0. If the Windows Management Framework Core package (KB968930) is installed, Powershell 2.0 can't be uninstalled separately so the entire package must be uninstalled.

The WMF Core package, or Windows Powershell 2.0, can be reinstalled after the SCMDM Admin tools have been installed.

Rich Pesenko | Senior Support Escalation Engineer

FYI: Integration of TechNet Blog User Account with TechNet Forums Profile

J.C. Hornbeck — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 06:25:53 GMT

For those of you who sign-in to comment on the TechNet Blogs, there is a change coming on January 27^th 1:00 pm (PST) regarding user accounts and profiles. Please click here to read about this change.

If you have questions please leave a comment on the linked blog post so that the TechNet Blogs platform team can reply to you directly.

J.C. Hornbeck | System Center Knowledge Engineer

New solution: System Center Mobile Device Manager 2008 SP1 device certificate renewal request fails after 12 months

J.C. Hornbeck — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 08:14:39 GMT

After being enrolled for a year, a System Center Mobile Device Manager (SCMDM) managed device may fail to renew its client certificate. As a result it will fail to connect to the SCMDM VPN successfully.

Additionally, the issuing Certificate Authority Application Event Log contains a warning similar to the following:

Event Type: Warning
Event Source: CertSvc
Event ID: 53
Description:
Certificate Services denied request 97 because The request contains conflicting template information. 0x80094802 (-2146875390). The request was for CN=device.contoso.com. Additional information: Denied by Policy Module 0x80094802, The request specifies conflicting certificate templates: 1.3.6.1.4.1.311.21.8.13101452.6590778.3820446.1524682.2069567.226.1027488195.1669196290/SCMDMMobileDevice(MDM1).

This can occur if there is a space in the template name. When the SCMDM managed device requests to renew its client certificate, the space character in the template name is dropped. As a result, the certification authority cannot process the request and results in the above error.

For the latest information on this issue including the resolution, see the following Knowledge Base article:

KB2273458 - System Center Mobile Device Manager 2008 SP1 device certificate renewal request fails after 12 months

J.C. Hornbeck | System Center Knowledge Engineer

New KB: A manually requested System Center Mobile Device Manager 2008 GCM certificate cannot be saved to the computer store

J.C. Hornbeck — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 09:20:26 GMT

In some situations, an administrator of System Center Mobile Device Manager 2008 (SCMDM) must manually request a Gateway Configuration Management (GCM) certificate from the Certificate Authority's (CA) web enrollment page. If the server hosting the web enrollment page has been updated with the hotfix described in Knowledge Base article KB922706, the option to "Store certificate in the local computer certificate store " will not appear.

This is because the hotfix changes the web enrollment page to support clients using Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7 and later clients. The underlying ActiveX control invoked by the "Store certificate in the local computer certificate store" checkbox no longer runs when the fix is applied, even if the client requesting the certificate is running an OS prior to Windows Vista.

For all the latest information and the current workarounds see the following Knowledge Base article:

KB2142221 - A manually requested System Center Mobile Device Manager 2008 GCM certificate cannot be saved to the computer store

J.C. Hornbeck | System Center Knowledge Engineer

Need personalized help implementing a Microsoft product or solution? Our new ProAdvisory service may be for you

J.C. Hornbeck — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 06:50:07 GMT

I know this isn’t necessarily specific to Mobile Device Manager but I wanted to let you know of a new support offering that we're rolling out.

I am sure many of you have contacted Microsoft for support in the past and are aware of our various support offerings. We have Consumer support, Professional support and various levels of Premier and Alliance Support. Premier level support is based on hourly contracts, but is most likely not economically feasible for smaller businesses, which is where Professional level support comes in. Pro support as we call it has a set cost per incident, and the problem is worked until resolution for that one price.

However, all of this applies to what we call break-fix issues.

If a customer does not have something that is broken that needs fixing, but instead wants a walkthrough or assistance in getting something set up, we call that Advisory Services. For Premier customers, this is really not a big deal, as they already have hourly contracts and whether an hour is spent on break-fix or advisory is really only important on the bookkeeping end. However, for a small company or individual who uses Professional pay-per-incident support, there was really no good avenue for them to obtain advisory services.

That is where Pro Advisory Support comes in. We now offer advisory services on an hourly basis without having to have a Premier contract and working through Microsoft Consulting Services. The service is still in pilot, and only covers certain specific scenarios, but more are being added all the time. Each group has their own supported scenarios, and there are too many to list here, but this is a small sampling of what my group has to offer at this point:

· Monitoring agents in an untrusted domain or workgroup using Operations Manager 2007

This Advisory offering assists customers in deploying agents in untrusted domains or workgroups and configuring Operations Manager 2007 so that those agents can be successfully monitored.

· Installing System Center Data Protection Manager 2007

Assist customers with the initial installation of a Data Protection Manager 2007 Server, including requirement evaluation, installation of all prerequisites and both local and remote installations of SQL Server.

There are of course more than just these, dozens in fact, and more are being added as the documentation is completed. Keep in mind also that this is still just the pilot; when the service goes into full production we will have a great many more supported scenarios that you can get our assistance with.

You can get more information on the various scenarios that are available at the Pro Advisory web page:

https://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?pr=advisoryservice

J.C. Hornbeck | System Center Knowledge Engineer