Recovering your Applications with ConfigMgr in a refresh or side-by-side migration
Hi All,
In this post I will introduce a couple of ways of getting your Applications redeployed in a side-by-side or refresh scenario. After all, USMT makes migrating your data and settings a breeze, so it is about time we look at getting those applications redelivered so that the impact of a migration on our beloved end-users is minimized. (To avoid them hassling us about their missing apps).
In short there are 4 ways of making sure apps get redeployed, each with their own unique pro’s & con’s.
- Advertise to End users. This is obviously one of the easiest ways. If you advertise to end users, once the user logs in, all advertisements targeted at the user will re-run and eventually the user will get all his applications back. Drawbacks of this method are rather obvious. For one, it can take quite a while for all these apps to get installed, and secondly if that user logs in to another machine to “quickly lookup something on the internet” than all those apps would end up on that machine as well. A nice way to alleviate much of this drawbacks is using Microsoft App-V and virtual applications.
- Use dynamic collections. By using dynamic collections, the machines will eventually (how long this takes depends on what your collection uses as criteria) end up back in the necessary collections, and will get his original applications redeployed. Drawbacks of this method is that “eventually” might take a pretty long time, depending on which criteria you use, and what schedules you have running on hardware inventory or the different active directory discovery methods.
- Use direct membership collections and migrate the SMSID. By migrating the SMSID from the old machine, so that the machine does remains its guid, and hence keeps it direct memberships, and by consequence receives all his original advertisements back. Kenny posted a way to have your id’s migrated using tranguid here: http://scug.be/blogs/sccm/archive/2008/10/27/sccm-in-place-upgrade-refresh-scenario-issues-solutions-with-tranguid-exe-part-1.aspx
- Use a script in your OSD tasksequence to analyze the original installed software from inventory in the database. By analyzing your inventory, you now, what applications were installed originally. If your script can tie that information to a package & programname pair, than you can set tasksequence variables and use the “install multiple applications” task sequence step to redeploy originally installed applications.
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Enjoy.
"Everyone is an expert at something"
Kim Oppalfens - Sms Expert for lack of any other expertise
Windows Server System MVP - SMS
http://www.scug.be/blogs/sccm/default.aspx
http://www.linkedin.com/in/kimoppalfens