Microsoft System Center 2012?

[Dutch]

Is anybody here big into SCCM, SCOM, SCSM development?

[cartman]

Back in the day, I did a lot of work with MOM, but haven't been keeping up with it much lately.

[Dutch]

A LOT has changed.

[cartman]

We wrote some stuff that would allow MOM to monitor Linux and Unix systems. From what I remember, there was a lot of XML and VB code. I'm sure now it is all PowerShell and .NET.

[Dutch]

SCSM management packs are all in XML, I believe that's true with SCOM. Of course, powershell applets are integral to the whole thing and customization requires some level of .NET framework knowledge.

[sterlingice]

We're implementing it right now where I work to replace Altiris

SI

[Dutch]

Nice. I'd like to hear how that goes. Do you have Microsoft premier support to come in and assist or are ya'll doing it yourself (we basically did this and it was painful!!!)

[sterlingice]

The server team is setting it up, so, unfortunately, that's somewhat opaque to us. We set up a dummy version in our lab and that took a couple of days. The fact that you have to match versions with SQL is just kindof silly and makes me feel like it's an immature product- it's like running across a program now that has to have .NET 3.0 specifically.

We've got professional services training coming in a couple of weeks to do training and we'll see how it goes. I think the server team has been cheap and hasn't wanted to use credits to set it up so I can't speak to how well they do.

It's funny to compare with Absolute Manage, which we implemented for our small Mac environment. We got pro services and training and they catered to our every whim, practically. The concern we had with them was the ability to scale up for our PC environment which is about 10x what our Mac one is. Meanwhile, SCCM feels like good ol' rigid Microsoft "our way or the highway" but, in theory, it can scale and by the time we roll it out, it will be too late if not.

There's been a decent amount of help online for getting things running on SCCM. I'm particularly fond of this set of tutorials:
System Center 2012 Configuration Manager Guides - Configuration Manager 2012 - www.windows-noob.com

SI

[Dutch]

To be honest, I've seen SCCM rolled out to massive enterprise networks and it works. It's not perfect, but it handles the workload (50,000+ machines across the WAN) just fine provided you have the architecture set up properly.

Microsoft has it's quirks, that's for sure, but they do a pretty good job with SCCM in leaving it wide open. (Which obviously plays into the local engineers going "oh fuck" when they realize they have to configure it to their architecture. )

SCSM, on the other hand, presents all sorts of challenges for scalability (it hasn't been specifically designed for that yet)...but we're gonna try and make it work anyway because we can't afford Remedy.

[sterlingice]

Originally Posted by Mike D

To be honest, I've seen SCCM rolled out to massive enterprise networks and it works. It's not perfect, but it handles the workload (50,000+ machines across the WAN) just fine provided you have the architecture set up properly.

Microsoft has it's quirks, that's for sure, but they do a pretty good job with SCCM in leaving it wide open. (Which obviously plays into the local engineers going "oh fuck" when they realize they have to configure it to their architecture. )

SCSM, on the other hand, presents all sorts of challenges for scalability (it hasn't been specifically designed for that yet)...but we're gonna try and make it work anyway because we can't afford Remedy.

Nah, in something that tells you how comically silo'd our organization is, there were new projects for both a new service desk replacement and CMS replacement (as both were on Altiris). I came in after all this happened, but from what I've seen, I'm not sure if there were any people who were on both projects. So we ended up with an Oracle PeopleSoft Service Desk and SCCM/Absolute for CMS in an org that is trying to get back to more "out of the box solutions" so they don't need the dev staff they have now. You know, because those connectors write themselves

And I suppose I sold Microsoft short in my previous description. Rigid in that you're never getting a feature request in. But crazily customizable, including several things you really can't fathom why anyone would want to customize, none of which are well documented so you have no idea why things don't work the way you want them.

SI

[hoopsguy]

My organization does quite a bit of SCCM work for our customers. I'm currently getting pulled into a conversation with the customer where we're revamping their Active Directory Sites & Services model to better leverage SCCM.

What SCCM features are you most interested in leveraging?
Where were the areas causing the most pain for your team with the SCCM deployment?

[Dutch]

For us, the stuff we are doing best is software deployment and patching. We've got it to the point where all approved software resides as a "package" in SCCM. When a user asks for a particular functionality, we determine what software does that, approve it for use, and add them to a "collection" that accepts that "package". That night, during the SCCM deployments window, they get a silent install of software that they wanted. No service desk personnel even knew it happened which is a HUGE win.

The stuff we have most problems with is 3rd party app updates like Java and Adobe stuff. And it took me forever to figure out Microsoft styled reporting with T-SQL and how to build relationships between reports. But I mostly have that on lock-down now.

[sterlingice]

Anyone watch or attend System Center Universe today? It was in Houston so I was able to attend and some of the presentations were helpful (others weren't as we aren't using Service Manager, for instance). I particularly liked Kent Agerlund's on freebie tools- the presentation was a bit all over the map but he had a really nice list: it just was way too quick.

SI

[jeff061]

My company has a Microsoft consulting practice that covers it and we have an office in Tampa.

Just saying...