have you ever consider using Twitter as a notification channel? I know, it sounds crazy, but I can be used in some scenarios (not only for OSD)

Scenario:

You need a notification channel that is easy to access and have a low cost.

Solution:

Basically we create a System Center Orchestrator Runbook that sends a tweet in the end of the task sequence. There is a list of items you need to make this happen. First you need a Twitter account, I suggest you get a dedicated one and that you “protect” it so you can control the followers. Next you need the Social Media integration pack (download from http://smip.codeplex.com/ and install it on your Orchestrator server) and last you need a Runbook that you can execute in the end of the task sequence.

The Connection to Twitter:

Create a twitter account and run the tool that is included in the integration pack to gain access to Twitter

In Orchestrator, configure a connection:

The Runbook:

Create a runbook that has 2 items, initialize data and tweet that uses you connection.

The TaskSequence:

Add your runbook in the end of the tasksequence

The Result:

Enjoy the power of the “cloud” :-)

/mike

This is the first post in series of post that will focus on the integration between MDT 2012 Update 1 and System Center 2012 Orchestrator.

The Scenario:

The company ViaMonstra is about to migrate to a new operating system. They will use the refresh scenario, but they would like to avoid doing backup of all computers. Luckily all VIP computers are a member of a global domain group. So what we need is a easy way to check the group membership of the computer. If the computer is a member of the VIP group we will do backup, otherwise we will not.

The Solution:

Create a runbook in Orchestrator that checks membership of the VIP group, add the runbook execution in the correct location in the task sequence, deploy and be happy.

The how to:

The Orchestrator Runbook

This is how the runbook needs to look.

The runbook works like this:

We feed the runbook with the name of the computer and the name of the group we would like to check membership of

Find the group in Active Directory

Check if the computer is a member of that group
(Note: We use the OSDComputername but to check the membership we need to add $ in the end of the variable, since that is the correct name of the computer when we search for the SM account name)

If the computer is a member we will return ComputerBackupLocation set to AUTO

If the computer is not a member of the group we will return ComputerBackupLocation set to NONE

To configure the return property correct you need to configure return value by adding whatever you would like to return using properties on the runbook it self.

The Task Sequence:

In the Task Sequence we will add runbook just before we fire up the backup, like this.

As you can see, the runbook will show us the runbook parameters it accept as input and in this case we are smart and use the same property name that are used in the Task Sequence, that is OSDComputerName. but it also need the Property VIPComputerGroup and that property needs to be added to customsettings.ini, like this

When running a test task sequence that only contains the runbook and some set parameters you can verify that the runbook works correct and return the correct property. Here is a picture of the bdd.log file where you can see that the when we send in the computername and VIPComputerGroup and we will get ComputerBackupLocation property as AUTO

It is pretty smart to create a test sequence that only contains the runbook plus property values you need to verify that it works, to do that just create a custom task sequence that looks like this and then run the sequence using LiteTouch.vbs and check the bdd.log file. Here is how the test task sequence looks like.

You can download the runbook, the test task sequence and customsettings ini here

/mike