How SCCM Makes Life Easy For System Admins

SCCM stands for System Center Configuration Manager and it is a technology from Microsoft to facilitate remote management of IT systems and resources. It is a very beneficial model for system admins who want to maintain a centralised control on the system. With businesses going global, companies are now having a vast geographical presence. Thousands of IT resources, not only computers and servers, are always connected and thousands of devices are accessing the data and these resources. Thus, manual attention to every module is simply not possible. SCCM provides the perfect solution. The IT admin can install new software or application, remove or uninstall it, upgrade or update system components, all over the internet, via SCCM. In this article, we will discuss a fictional situation which can be so well handled by SCCM peer to peer mechanism.

In our fictitious company, a new hardware policy is adopted and thus, hardware was changed all over the world. The images were refreshed as well. The roll-out was a success using SCCM. We will tell you how it went.

A few machines started to show errors after user login, after the update. The error had nothing to do with the operating system or the 3rd party software. It was due to a malfunction of the proprietary software of the company. In fact, the IT team ran a few tests via remote console and realised that the error was caused by the permissions setting in the application folder.

Hundreds of machines were affected by this bug and thus, manual attention to each machine was simply not possible. Thankfully, Microsoft offers a script called XCACLS.vbs which can be deployed via SCCM. This script is readily available on the official website of Microsoft. There is ample documentation on the website as well, regarding how to use the script or how to tweak the script to satisfy your particular needs.

This script was loaded in the SCCM configuration manager for remote deployment to the affected systems. The script was coded such that each affected machine was supposed to download it automatically. This is called a push. An unattended install mechanism, in which the used doesn't need to intervene or give any input, was also created. The update program was set to run automatically once the user logs in. the new permission setting would be applied right after the user’s logs in but before he executes the program.

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