Microsoft Windows InTune: Computers Overview

This is the second screen in the Windows InTune Console:

Computers

On the left you can see a list of all the computer groups that I’ve created. These machines are on 3 different networks but they all appear in this one central view, which makes administration very easy!

Selecting a group on the left takes you into a new view where you can see much more granular detail on the machines. At the minute, I’ve only got one machine in each group but you get the idea

The “View Properties” button takes you deeper into that machine, with more sections available to view:

The first few tabs are all quite self explanatory…but the final two are very interesting.

Hardware

This gives an amazingly detailed list of the hardware in and related to the machine. For my laptop, this information includes:

• Model
• Serial Number
• BIOS Name & Version
• CPU Name/Type/Speed
• Number of disks
• Disk model
• Disk Size
• Number of partitions
• Network adapter
• IP Address
• MAC Address
• Monitor Resolution
• Printers (including Soft printers like OneNote)

and more. It’s similar to the free ware program CPU-Z (which you may be familiar with) in that it gets really deep into you machine to give you all the information you could possibly need!

Software

This gives a list of all software installed on the machine…in this case:

It then gives you an idea of the category such as Browser, OS, Utility etc and also tells you if it’s a Virtual Application.

You can export these lists to either .csv or .html files for use with other applications and systems.

This feature fits really well in to the whole Software Asset Management piece, as organizations will have a complete, current list of all software installed on all machines. It’s very quick to update with added/removed software which will enable companies to be confident of compliance at all times.

Groups:

Creating a group is very straight forward. It has 3 sections, each with just one selection to make:

Details = Group name (and an optional description field)

Parent Group = Choose which group this will link off from. Either “All Computers” or one of your own.

Members = Choose which machines to add to the group.

Done.

I’ll cover deploy software to machines etc in a later post.

Microsoft Sharepoint 2010 and VMWare Error

I installed Sharepoint 2010 on a Virtual Server last week, set up some new site collections and then when I came to use it, got a very strange error:

”The trial period for Sharepoint Foundation has expired”

Strange because this wasn’t a trial and because it wasn’t Sharepoint Foundation…it was full server 2010!

I did a little searching round the web and saw something on the Microsoft forum that suggested it might be related to Windows Web Server. I checked and yes, our System Admin had built the VM with Windows Web Server…but than itself was weird…why did he do that?

I went downstairs and asked him…he didn’t make a web server, it was Windows Server Std 2008 R2 but by the time it got to me, it had magically morphed into a Web server…WTF?

The media being used was from MSDN and contained Std, Ent & Web in one image and you choose which one you want during the installation. The Sys Admin built a Svr Std machine, converted it to a VMWare template, deployed it again and gave it to me…and there was the problem. We tried again and this time, COPIED it to a template (rather than converting) and hey presto, it all worked perfectly. The VM was a Svr Std box and, after re-installing it, Sharepoint 2010 was up & running straight away

I don’t know if this is a known problem and perhaps it seems really obvious to some, but it had me stumped for a while so I thought I’d share it on here…just in case.