Here are some photo highlights from the Intel Anti-Theft Technology session at IDF. You can download the presentation at http://www.intel.com/go/idfsessions. Click on the thumbnails to see fullsize pictures.

After working with Intel vPro technology for over 3 years - I still get surprised by little features that appear in the product.   Some features might not sound too interesting at first, but upon seeing how these are used my opinion changes.

One such features is the "PC Alarm Clock" capability in AMT 5, with software development support in the Intel AMT SDK 5.1.

An overview of this features is explained at http://communities.intel.com/docs/DOC-3483.... why that article is posted in the Server Room area of Open Port I do not know.

I was at IDF2009 this week and had a chance to visit the McAfee showcase booth.  What I saw was very impressive.   PC Alarm Clock provides a uniform "wake-up" at a defined time with an indication of what caused the power-on.   Was the system powered on because of a user hitting the power button or did the PC Alarm clock trigger the event?   Before visiting the McAfee booth, my first thought was "hey - that can be done via a system BIOS".   Well - I got some education.

Not all OEM BIOS setups support a timed wake-up.   If they do - having a uniform access to configure\control across OEMs would require disparate tools.   Plus - having a mechanism for an agent to know whether the system was powered due to user local to system or scheduled time is helpful.  Plus - an Intel AMT power-on event to a collection of systems is possible IF those systems are connected and IF you are okay with a unicast message to each system thus having a potential delay from first system to last system that powers on.  Plus - with PC Alarm Clock within Intel AMT - the time is synchronized.  Etc, etc

So here's the situation.   To avoid disrupting work hours with anti-virus scans or other maintenance routines... what if the system were scheduled to power-on at 3am to perform these tasks.   If powered on via PC Alarm clock, what McAfee agent will do is sense this and know that it's time to run a scan, and so forth.   At the conclusion of the scan, the McAfee setup will gracefully shutdown the system.   Thus - all assigned systems get a set time to power-on... and at that set time, all systems power-up, check to ensure it was a scheduled power-on, run the scan, and then return to an off start gracefully.

Ok - to some that might seem too simple to really matter.   But to me, after working with various management solutions and Intel vPro technology - that's a better cool approach.   It's a difference of push vs. pull... and when you're talking about hundreds or thousands of systems being orchestrated to perform an event... that little feature called "PC Alarm Clock" in the right hands such as McAfee... it's pretty cool

What do you think?

Enjoy this shout out..

• Client virtualization enables IT and end-user value
• Optima3 l balance with Dynamic Virtual Clients
• DVC with vPro technology for secure manageability, trusted execution, and robust virtualization
• Virtualization drives new hardware requirements

Here's a good showcase from Paul on vPro and the new features, including anti-theft.   Also what is very cool is the example of a MID in the enterprise that can kick off the kill pill for a stolen laptop.

More to come in the classes and highlights from the team.  Stay Tuned for more.    I'll also put on a higher res version post IDF. 

PROS001 Technical Overview of Next Generation Intel® vPro™ Technology
PROS002 Increasing Client Manageability with Intel® vPro™ Technology and Microsoft* System Center Configuration Manager 2007
PROS003 Client Virtualization and Intel® vPro™ Technology
PROS004 Small and Medium Business: How to Deliver Intel® vPro™ Technology
PROS005 Thieves Beware: Intel® Powered Notebooks Will Turn Into Bricks When Stolen!
PROP001 Interactive Panel on Benefits of Intel® Anti-theft Technology (Intel® AT)
PROP002 Deploying and Managing Intel® vPro™ Technology in Enterprise Environments
PROL001-002 Extreme Programming with Intel® vPro™ Technology: Pushing the Limits with Innovative Software
PROQ001 Intel® vPro™ Technology Deployment Best Practices in Enterprise Environments
Additional info in the Intel® vPro ™ Technology community – Showcase, 1st floor
Book on topic: Active Platform Management Demystified: Unleashing the Power of Intel® vPro™ Technology (Intel Press)

September 23rd - 4-5PM PST we are going to do a tweetup for vPro, SCCM SP2 & Win7.   I'll post out the hashtag shortly and details so you can join us either @ IDF or online.

Anand Pashupathy (left) and Mojtaba Mirashrafi developed an idea for an anti-theft service for laptops into a shipped product in just 12 months.

Great article about their startup and a little about Mr. USB.

http://www.oregonbusiness.com/articles/69-september-2009/2159-on-the-edge

Beyond the Firewall: Using Fast Call for Help to Manage PCs with Intel vPro technology

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

8:00 AM - 9:30 AM PDT

This webinar  introduces Intel vPro Technology's 'Fast Call For Help' (FCFH) capability, which allows you to manage your systems that are outside your firewall. Intel and Checkpoint will demonstrate how you can run Asset Discovery, Remote Power Management and Remote Diagnostic and Repair, even when the systems are outside your firewall.

Register here: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/314239651

If you were unable to attend our latest webinar, "Enhancing the Symantec Management Platform (Altiris) with Intel® vPro™ Technology," then you can now view it online. In addition, you can download the PowerPoint slides; you'll find them as an attachment to this posting.

Watch the Webinar

Click to view the webinar.

Additional Resources

In addition to all of this great info, Terry has provided additional resources to help you get up to speed quickly:

• General questions about the capabilities of Symantec and Intel vPro technology
  • Combining in-band and out-of-band management scenarios
  • Collection of videos from ManageFusion (March 2009)
    
    
• Using OOB Discovery and more in-depth on agent-less inventory
  • “Do I have vPro in my environment?”
  • Finding exactly which systems have Intel® AMT and their current state
    
    
• How to define and utilize custom network filters
  
  
• Can Symantec utilize the Serial-over-LAN interface?
  • Yes – for boot to BIOS or pre-GUI viewing. Serial-over-LAN can provide interface via VT100/ANSI compliant (i.e. text) remote control.
  • Learn about additional capabilities of the Serial-over-LAN interface.
    
    
• Symantec training course on vPro
  • Visit http://education.symantec.com and click “Client Management Suite” under Section 4: Infrastructure Operations.
  • Select course AT5500 entitled “Altiris Enhancing Out of Band Automation with Intel vPro Technology.”
    
    
• For self instruction (videos are ~2 years old, yet still applicable)
  • Online activation workshop
    
    
• Index of additional resources and insights to using\configuring\deploying vPro in an Altiris environment

For those of you out there that are  using the SMS Addon the following might be of interest, if seeing close to 100% success rates is your thing...

If you've been using the SMS Addon together with Microsoft SMS as your vPro enabled management console of choice then you might have experienced less than 100% success rates when you're trying to perform AMT operations on collections of machines. The following details I will be providing have been devised specifically in the context of using the AMT wake-up feature for a Power Management Use Case, however you can extrapolate the essence and apply elsewhere if you're using some of the other features in the SMS Addon...

Ok enough of an introduction.

If you're implementing the power management use case, then before you'll be using the AMT wake-up feature, you'll be putting machines to sleep according to a certain policy you've put together (user initiated, SMS job executed shutdown.exe or some other shutdown scripts). However, you want to be sure that the machines you have put to sleep can be woken up on demand - mandatory advertisement triggered wake-up, scheduled wake-up or console initiated wake-up. Finding out you can't wake some machines up that you've put to sleep is far from being ideal - effectively you're reducing the success rate of your use case and you're putting machines in a state where you're benefiting from power savings, but you've compromised on your ability to get access to that machine from remote.

What might interest you then is a deterministic way to ensure that every machine you put to sleep as part of your power management use case, you can wake up. Well... we've done just that.

Here is the trick - you create your SMS collection for machines that you want to put to sleep and then wake-up, with a simple SQL statement of:

' Select * where iAMTStatus = 1'  - the key here is this field iAMTStatus = 1 which is a return value that confirms the SMS Addon can communicate successfully with the vPro machine. Therefore you now have a deterministic way of knowing that a machine that you've put to sleep can be woken up using SMS Addon and the AMT wake-up feature.

An improvement on that is to run an AMT discovery daily (or some other frequency) to dynamically update the collection based on the ability of the SMS Addon to get to machines successfully. This will cater for if there are any changes in your environment, which there might or might not be. Currently the only way to run an AMT Discovery repeatedly on machines that have already been discovered in the past is to manually right click on a collection in the SMS Console and select AMT Discovery. We might have a more automated way of doing this soon... so watch this space.

Hopefully you find this useful.

- a caveat/disclaimer I should perhaps mention is that his method does not mean you will have 100% success rate for ALL your machines. Undoubtedly you will have some machines that do not have iAMTStatus = 1. Effectively what you're doing here is defining the scope.