System Management

Johan Arwidmark, Setup & Deployment MVP, just finished working on his Version 2.0 Deployment CD. It contains the following Step-by-step guides and Video Tutorials:

MDT 2010 Lite Touch Deployments (deployment without ConfigMgr 2007 SP2 R2, just the free tools)

• LTI01 – Installing the server for MDT 2010 Lite Touch
• LTI02 – Creating a Windows 7 reference image using Lite Touch
• LTI03 – Deploying a Windows 7 image using Lite Touch
• LTI04 – Dynamic Settings, creating and using the deployment database

MDT 2010 Zero Touch Deployments (deployment with ConfigMgr 2007 SP2 R2)

• ZTI01 – Installing the server for MDT 2010 Zero Touch and ConfigMgr 2007 SP2
• ZTI02 – Creating a Windows 7 reference image using ConfigMgr 2007 SP2
• ZTI03 – Deploying a Windows 7 image using ConfigMgr 2007 SP2
• ZTI04 – Dynamic Settings, creating and using the deployment database

Additional Presentations

• E01 – New features in MDT 2010
• E02 – Upgrading MDT 2008 to MDT 2010
• E03 – Migrating Windows XP to Windows 7

And guess what? He’s offering the CD for free to everybody who need and want it. You can register for a free download at www.deploymentcd.com.

Last month, after restoring the only ConfigMgr site and importing new reports, I saw that none of the reports I’m using have a link to another report.

To be sincere, this was a problem I didn’t know where to start troubleshooting. Thanks to guys from Microsoft’s ConfigMgr forum, who helped me identify the problem and recommended some troubleshooting steps.

So, the problem was due the fact that none of my reports had a link to another report. Don’t know how this happened… Anyway, to resolve this issue, I quickly installed a ConfigMgr site in a virtual machine and using Tom Watson’s advice, created a query that lists all reports with links to other reports. The query is something like this:

SELECT     TOP (100) PERCENT ReportID, Name, Category, DrillThroughReportID
FROM       dbo.v_Report
WHERE      (NOT (DrillThroughReportID IS NULL))
ORDER BY   ReportID

and the result looks like this:

DrillThroughReportID tells the ReportdID of the linked report. Basically, in a default configuration, I know the original ReportID and the linked ReportID.

Now, knowing these info, I’m manually creating the links in my production environment. This is a long process indeed, but I couldn’t find a way to automate this.