New cool features in Configuration Manager 1909 TP

I love playing around with a new Technical Preview and test everything out and complete the scenarios each time a new Tech Preview is released. If you don’t do it yourself, try it out it is great fun.

Orchestration groups

Orchestration groups are here! A long-awaited update/rewrite of Server groups which has been around for a long while but had some limitations. On huge difference is that we don’t use collections anymore. We simply deploy the updates to our servers then we add our servers we want to orchestrate updates to in an Orchestration group and then that Orchestration will take place when the software updates are installed. Really nice!

MBAM

The MBAM integration is one of my favorite features for a long while, it will be great when we have it integrated and can use it in production. In this release the self-service portal can be installed using PowerShell so we have that feature as well from MBAM to provide self-service. The reports from the MBAM SCCM integration we had before is now integrated and can be used. I will test this out and write a post on MBAM only as well.

Task Sequence improvements

Using Task Sequences over the internet to do Windows 10 Servicing is great and it has just gotten better as when now can set use download on demand over the internet, which is great especially if we have many language steps in the TS, drivers and more.

Apply Windows Settings Step

They are stored in the following variables so we can script it easily.

OSDWindowsSettingsInputLocaleOverride
OSDWindowsSettingsSystemLocaleOverride
OSDWindowsSettingsUserLocaleOverride
OSDWindowsSettingsUILanguageOverride
OSDWindowsSettingsUILanguageFallbackOverride
OSDTimeZoneOverride

Install Windows 10 Prelrease using Software Updates

We can now deploy insider builds of Windows 10 using Configuration Manager, we have to select the new category and then they show up under Windows 10 Servicing where we can download and deploy them using Servicing plans.

Extend and migrate an on-premises site to Microsoft Azure

In the TP 1909 we can easily migrate or move our SCCM infrastructure to Azure. Especially the Site high-availability scenario looks really interesting check it out from the official blog post. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sccm/core/get-started/2019/technical-preview-1909#bkmk_Azure-migration

CMPivot

CMPivot has gotten a lot of new features and is a great tool for SCCM Admins but also for security people to conduct hunting, check for vulnerabilities and more. Help spread the word to the Security guys now that we have CMPivot standalone as well.

Check out the whole article on what’s new in technical Preview here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sccm/core/get-started/2019/technical-preview-1909