Here is part one of a series on how to use the OSD Webportal, in this first I talk about the idea behind this tool and what the future will bring…
First we wanna hear about the idea of this tool to better understand it 🙂
I was working on some customer projects and there are some cases where the support team should be able to manage some little actions with clients in their environment, and it was desired to use a website and not the CM Console. In all these cases they want to capture clients and allocate them to collections to start OS deployment over SCCM. In additional cases, they’d like to allocate locations (some need it for language, country codes and keyboard layout and some need this for departments to allocate standard software during OSD).
Another case is to restage some clients when they come back to storage and need a redeployment with other settings, or they leave the company (e.g. disposal) then we have to delete the clients for no longer use in SCCM.
The tool is based on a framework from my partner company Syliance (www.syliance.com). They wrote a web service for SCCM which exposes various functions they are using in their tools. They have made a light version available for me for free which is offering the OSD capabilities used in my tool. Feel free to reach out to Syliance if you are looking for more features, such as User and Device Affinity, SW allocation, etc.There are some features in OSD Webportal that we want to expand on:
- You can import CSV files with a list of computers that get assigned to the right collections
- You can write variables directly to a selected collection that are in this tool
If you have some other ideas, please let me know and we will think about implementing this in the tool, but remember: just for OSdeployment 😉
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