Disclaimer
The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent anyone else's view in any way, including those of my employer.
© Copyright 2009
The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent anyone else's view in any way, including those of my employer.
© Copyright 2009
1E released a new white paper written by Ian Godfrey last week entitled Remote Management of BIOS Configuration, which is centered around configuring Wake-on-LAN but the concepts and tools can be used to manipulate other BIOS settings as well.
This paper covers a number of different hardware vendors and how to remotely configure the BIOS, something that is not standard across the hardware vendors. It includes links to different tools, ConfigMgr integration, scripts, tips, troubleshooting, and a very in depth explanation of WOL. If you are having trouble getting some computers to wake up when they are sent a magic packet or you need to learn how to remote administer the BIOS without touching each computer this is a must read.
Regards,
Anthony
Anthony Clendenen | Solutions Engineer | 1E
Microsoft MVP System Center Configuration Manager
© Anthony Clendenen
Right before Christmas 1E released not only the free tool Service Window that I mentioned in my last post but also new versions of NightWatchman now version 5.5, 1E WakeUp version 5.5, Nomad Enterprise 3.2 and our first version of the NightWatchman console. Over the last 18 months I had been working with AT&T® to prove out the 1E Power and Patch Management Pack, which is a combination of 1E WakeUp and NightWatchman. July 31st the deal with AT&T closed and in late October we did a joint press release with AT&T about the savings. In the end they are going to save about $1 million a month or $60 million dollars over 5 years, and those are pretty modest figures, and I know they are because I actually wrote the report for them based on the pilot data from their AFR server. They are also going to save 135 million kWh’s of electricity each year while eliminating 124,000 tons of CO2 emissions. It was a great project and now one of our consultants Richard Fellows has been working with them on the implementation across their 310,000 PC’s. As is usually the case our customers dictate the new features included in our products and I all of the Solution Engineers at 1E are also now aligned with a single product so we are involved in the entire development cycle, at least as much as we can since we travel a fair amount of time. But NightWatchman 5.5 is the product I typically spend the most time with also the reporting server as well AFR.
Here is a short list of the new features in version 5.5 of NightWatchman and I will explain most them in more depth below as well as how to configure and use them.
I will start with the Keep Active feature, it is probably the easiest of the new features to explain. This is an option that allows the user to decide if they want to keep their PC from being put into a low power state. This includes a scheduled shutdown as well as the power scheme settings so the computer will not go into any low power states during the Keep Active period. This is not something you would like your employees to use every day because they could defeat the energy savings program for their computer. There is going to be some changes in the next version of NightWatchman about how much control you turn back over to the employee.
One example of how someone might use this feature is let’s say Paul Thomsen and I are working late in his office in Redmond and we want to run some automated tests on some of his lab computers but we also don’t want the machines to go into a low power state or shutdown at the scheduled time of 7 PM because we need these tests to complete while we are eating at Azteca we are not sure how long we are going to be over there so we set Keep Active on the lab computers to 2 hours. That gives us a little time to walk over there eat and get back without our tests being interrupted by the computers going into a low power state from the power scheme settings or the scheduled shutdown time.
They do this simply by right clicking on the NightWatchman icon in the system tray and selecting “Keep Active”.
Then after they click Keep Active from the context menu it will open a dialog box with a drop down box allowing them to select the amount of time they want to set their computer to keep active. During the Keep Active period the NightWatchman tray icon also changes so the user can turn it back off if they want to.
Maintenance windows and alarm clocks have some similarity to them. They are both a scheduled wakeup for the NightWatchman client but the alarm clock function is for end users and maintenance windows are for administrators. The end result is the same for both however, to schedule the computer to come out of a low power state at a certain time on a specific day.
For the Alarm Clock feature this can be used by the employee to schedule when their computer is going to be turned on in the morning so that all (startup) group policies have run or if there are things that happen to the computer that make the boot time in double digits. Since you can configure the time and for each day if the employee only works 4 – 10’s, then they could schedule their computer to only come on 10 minutes before their start time on those four days of the week so it doesn’t come on the other three days of the week.
The Maintenance Window feature is for the IT staff to be able to schedule a computer or group of computer, to come out a low power state at a scheduled time and then after a your maintenance is completed return the computer back to the low power state it was in for the remainder of the night or weekend. This is useful for things that you need to do outside of ConfigMgr, say anti-virus scans or updates.
The Alarm Clock settings are configured in the NightWatchman console (which I cover below), the Maintenance Window settings are also configured in the NightWatchman console.
You can see this tab is displaying the Maintenance Window, one option is to turn the monitor on when the computer is brought out a low power state for the Maintenance Window. Usually you would want the monitor to stay off assuming that you schedule your Maintenance Windows for off hours. As you can see you can schedule or not schedule the Maintenance Window start time for each day separately, how long the computer will remain on, essentially setting the duration of the Maintenance Window. And then at the end of the Maintenance Window what low power state do you want the computer to go into. In this first version the low power options are standby and hibernate, off will be coming soon.
Now you can see that I have scheduled a window for Monday, Wednesday and Friday, they are for different durations and Friday I want the system to go back to hibernate.
The NightWatchman console is a server side console to configure the NightWatchman clients. You can group clients based on business unit and based on physical locations. For example, what state they are in and what department they are in. This helps with the reporting portion. Also as I covered above the Alarm Clock and Maintenance Window settings are configured in the console. But also the scheduled shutdown times and power scheme policies for the clients, which goes back to the grouping again.
As you can see from these two images which are the power scheme settings (top) and power policies (bottom) there are a number of settings that you can configure along with each of these. Traditionally this would have been done with ConfigMgr or group policy but with the NightWatchman console we add another option for administrators to configure the client settings.
The NightWatchman console is targeted at customers who either do not have ConfigMgr or SMS but still need the Wake-on-LAN functionality of 1E WakeUp and for customers that have different groups that will manage NightWatchman and ConfigMgr.
Configuring the NightWatchman console is more about configuring the clients although there is a Security tab that will allow you to control which users and groups get to see or configure all the settings in the console.
Lets start with an overall of the console.
On the left of the console are the tabs NightWatchman Clients, Power Schemes, Power Policies, Power Consumption and Security.
The last two tabs are Power Consumption and Security. The Power Consumption tab is used to configure what power figures are used by the different clients in the various states to ensure accurate power, carbon and costs are used in the reports. This is a very important feature as the various hardware vendors and models use dramatically different amounts of power in all the different power states. Not having this feature would be like assuming an 8 year old 21” CRT used the same amount of power as my daughters LCD on her Dell Mini. And trying to figure power costs, consumption and CO2 emissions without these numbers is just a guess – at best. On the Security tab you configure the security settings for the console, allowing users and groups different levels of rights on all the tabs and their settings.
I will save the last two new features for a future post, this one turned out to be much longer that I anticipated.
As always if you have any questions or comments let me know!
Regards,
Anthony
Anthony Clendenen | Solutions Engineer | 1E
Microsoft MVP System Center Configuration Manager
© Anthony Clendenen
Right before Christmas 1E released its first free tool for ConfigMgr admins in a while called Service Window. This tool will allow you to edit, delete, add and view maintenance windows for ConfigMgr clients. You can run the app on the client machine or by specifying the remote computer you want to examine.
Here is the app running on my laptop where you can see there are currently no Maintenance Windows defined, so essentially my laptop will run an mandatory advertisement or task sequence at any time.
If I want to add a new maintenance window I click the button with the “+” key on it. 
This opens another window to configure and set the maintenance window.
As you can see I can define the start and stop time of the maintenance window, the date it begins, if it reoccurs, what type of reoccurrence, and on which day it reoccurs. There is also a checkbox at the bottom of the window that allows you specify that the maintenance window only applies to an OSD task sequence.
I am going to use the defaults just to create the window. If you are following along you should be back in the main window with the new maintenance window defined like this.
If I select the maintenance window I get the two other options to view the selected maintenance window and edit it, and also the delete button which will delete the maintenance window selected.
At the bottom of the main window is also a view button that will open a window that displays the maintenance windows in a graphical format such as below.
You can switch the view to show a week at a time or just today as well.
One of the best options is the ability to delete a maintenance window, if you are testing a client this tool makes testing maintenance windows easy and extremely quick, you do not have to wait for you clients to get the policy to define, modify, add or delete a maintenance window.
1E has plans to develop a number of free tools for ConfigMgr moving forward, if you have any ideas for tools or have any feedback on this one send me an email.
Regards,
Anthony
Anthony Clendenen | Solutions Engineer | 1E
Microsoft MVP System Center Configuration Manager
© Anthony Clendenen
While they also updated several of their tools like Process Explorer, Handle, ZoomIt and SigCheck, the much more interesting news is that you don’t have to download the tools any longer and put them somewhere in %PATH% you can execute them directly from the website. How cool is that?
From a command prompt or Run simply type \\live.sysinternals.com\tools\<tool name here>
And this site has all of their tools, check it out on their site at http://live.sysinternals.com
You can sill download the tools if you want to use them locally, go to the same link and click on the exe and/or the chm file to download them.
This is a quote from the About_This_Site.txt file.
“What is this?
This is a file share allowing access to all Sysinternals utilities. We have developed this to test an alternate distribution mechanism for our utilities.
This will allow you to run these tools from any computer connected to the Internet without having to navigate to a webpage, download and extract the zip file.
If you are unfamiliar with Microsoft Windows Sysinternals, it is highly recommended that you visit the website at http://technet.microsoft.com/sysinternals before using these tools.
If you have any questions or comments on this file share, please email syssite@microsoft.com
Regards,
The Microsoft Windows Sysinternals Team”
Regards,
Anthony
Anthony Clendenen | Solutions Engineer | 1E
Microsoft MVP System Center Configuration Manager
© Anthony Clendenen
Download the Visio add in and the web server component to connect and generate datasets to connect to your existing diagrams or auto generate your diagrams for your infrastructure monitoring needs. See your data from OpsManager and ConfigManager live in Visio diagrams.
Ronni Pedersen’s Blog Site: Microsoft Office Visio 2007 Pro SCOM & SCCM Connectors
Regards,
Anthony
Anthony Clendenen | Solutions Engineer | 1E
© Anthony Clendenen
After you win the Wii at the 1E booth (311) at MMS and you have made Pro on all the sports, have made all your family 
members and friends into Wii peeps, the next logical step is to stream all your music and videos with it from your PC upstairs to your Wii downstairs in your media room. XBox does this out of the box (no pun intended) from what I have heard, since my daughter is only in second grade and my son is just in junior high they aren’t quite ready for an XBox, plus I suck at video games so I am not a gamer. The Wii doesn’t have a whole suite of additional features, and streaming music and video is not one of them. It does come with a built in wireless adapter so you can get it on your home wireless pretty easy. It also uses Opera for a web browser. I mention both of these because you will need them for streaming.
I was first introduced to Orb several years ago when I got my first Netgear wireless router, it was 802.11B, so that should give you some idea on how many years ago. The Orb CD came in the box and I checked it out to see what it was. Set it up, showed it off at work a few times and then I didn’t use it much again. Back when I was still working at ESRI I played Classical music in my office all day and it was local plus I didn’t want to use up the bandwidth needlessly. I looked at it again when I started to travel with my last employer (Hey everyone!) I even bought a tuner card, but I don’t really like TV, and really don’t like 99.99% of movies for a list of reasons so I didn’t really end up using Orb or the tuner card.
But now that I have a home office upstairs, and my wife’s art studio is downstairs when I am at home and the kids are in school and I am not on the phone I will play music, but I have to play music we both like and loud enough for her to hear. So this is not ideal. But our Wii is hooked up to the surround sound system and LCD downstairs, so if she could play music from it and choose her own music, and what level that would just about be perfect!
So what you will need:
Get additional addons for Orb from their MyExtras here.
extras include video mail, watching Internet videos on your mobile device, and watching you video content on your TV instead of in Flash in the Wii’s Opera browser.
You can get version 1.0 of Orb here.
Once you have Orb installed you will have to create an account. Next specify what folders you want to include in the different categories. Keep in mind that any folder you put on there you and your family will be able to access from the Wii console.
After you have Orb configured you will need to get the browser installed on your Wii if you haven’t got it already. Once it is just go to orb.com, put in your account info and you will be listening and viewing in just a few seconds.
In Orb you can search by artist, title, genre, playlist, resume a playlist, shuffle your search results, it’s pretty nice.
And if you have bluetooth in your car, a phone with an unlimited data plan and bluetooth…
Regards,
Anthony
Anthony Clendenen | Solutions Engineer | 1E
© Anthony Clendenen
If you don’t know I am a HUGE OneNote fan and have converted countless people from using Notepad, Notepad2, Word, paper, you name it to using OneNote since it first came out in Office 2003. (If you are only interested in the the list of OneNote PowerToys, skip this section and scroll down).
Some of my favorite things are the ability to write anywhere, assign "tags" to notes, copy and drag from anywhere, any application, webpage, pdf – anywhere into a OneNote page, and have it enter the link where it came from directly below it, create Outlook tasks or appointments, even contacts directly from the notes. You can record audio and/or video directly into a note page, you can password protect sections, you can draw, highlight, email…and one of the functions I use most, use the Windows key + S to screen clip any area of your desktop without losing the mouse focus on a menu or highlighted item!
Here is an example. On the left is a screen clip using OneNote’s function and you can see the Firefox right click context menu after left clicking on a link on Chris Pratley’s OneNote blog. On the right is text that from the same page that I copied and then drug onto the same note page, as you can see at the very bottom is a link to where it was copied from. You can also see that the same link that I used in my screen clipping example is brought over automatically into OneNote.
Let’s see what else I can do with these two examples.
You can see I have taken the text from Chris’ blog and the image of my Firefox context menu and switched their position on my notes page, I also shrunk down the image size and moved it lower on the page, I could also do things like make the text in the image searchable, crop the image, send it to the back, resize it, save it externally. OneNotes screen clipping tool also allow you to set default behavior when you do capture an area, copy it to the clipboard or copy it to the clipboard and send it to the Unfiled notes section of OneNote, and either view it or not. I just use the copy to clipboard option.
I also added some things after the text I copied in. I added a "To Do" tag next to the text "Get list of plugins for blog post" it’s that empty checkbox, that I can later check when I am done. I can also create a summary page that shows all my To Do’s, tasks, remember for later, follow up, essential any tags I choose for a notebook and it will group them together, showing completed items together. The search function in OneNote is one of its better features as well.
The next line is just to highlight another one of the tags, which you can assign hot keys by ordering them. And the final line is a tag that I have customized. It is a "For Follow Up" tag that I have made the text white and to highlight it in red. You can build you own custom tags or customize the built-in ones.
Here is the tags toolbar, also captured with OneNotes screen clipping tool
The original intent of this was to capture a list of OneNote plugins because I could not find a single source that had them all. So here is a list of plugins I was able to locate at the time of posting.
Pasted from <http://blogs.msdn.com/descapa/archive/2007/03/03/sort-sections-powertoy.aspx>
Pasted from <http://blogs.msdn.com/descapa/archive/2007/02/17/sort-pages-powertoy.aspx>
Task Requests from OneNotes Meeting Notes
Updated OneNotes Favorites addin (3/20/2008 v1.61)
This allows you to tag a note page as a favorite, essentially creating a favorites list like in IE in OneNote.
Calendar PowerToy by Josh Einstein – allows you a to view your notes by the date you wrote them
From : OneNote PowerToys Blog
(Sorted by me)
Working in OneNote:
Table Sum Powertoy for OneNote
ReadOnly Section Addin (OneNote 2007)
Official Powertoy: My Font Tool for Tablet PC
OneNote Favorites PowerToy (old version -see above)
Import to OneNote:
Jeremy Lewi’s SendTo OneNote PowerToy
Microsoft Dynamics CRM2OneNote
Import texts from Project Gutenberg
Send to OneNote 2007 from Windows Explorer
Outlook to OneNote AddIn (Outlook “rule”)
GBM How-To: Add OneNote 2007 Printer as Right-click Send To option
Application integration:
OneNote 2007 Integration with MindManager Pro 7
SnagIt Output for OneNote 2007!
Updated: “Clip to OneNote” Firefox Extension
Export your Outlook notes to OneNote (2007)
Windows Live Messenger Send To OneNote 2007
GoogleNewsReader to OneNote PowerToy
Eclipse RCP Snippet for OneNote
Regards,
Anthony
Anthony Clendenen | Solutions Engineer | 1E
© Anthony Clendenen
FolderShare has gotten a face lift, new client, and has moved to the Windows Live platform. If you are not familiar with FolderShare Microsoft bought them a couple years ago and the concept is that you can setup shares among computers that sync with each other. I have been using it for years to sync computers and make sure that I have the same documents on each computer. You can set the sync to be automatic or on demand, you can also share your FolderShare libraries with your friends. It is similar to Groove but it is a free service.
New FolderShare Blog.
New Windows client direct download.
Regards,
Anthony
Anthony Clendenen | Solutions Engineer | 1E
© Anthony Clendenen
SkyDrive is part of Live and is a free service that allows you to put files online and share them with others or keep them private but have access to them from anywhere you have a Internet connection.
Regards,
Anthony
Anthony Clendenen | Solutions Engineer | 1E
© Anthony Clendenen
This is rather interesting. Apparently Microsoft is going to release Google Earth backwards on Feb 27th. Meaning that instead of zooming and panning in on Earth you will be able to do the same with cosmos! This should be quite interesting. It is reported that they will use 10 Earth bound telescopes as well as the beleaguered Hubble telescope to produce an explorable cosmos for your desktop. It will be interesting to see how they deal with distance for the stars as this is always been the major problem for astronomers. More details here.
Regards,
Anthony
Anthony Clendenen | Solutions Engineer | 1E
© Anthony Clendenen
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