Windows 7 Coming out October 2009…
What are we getting ourselves into this time?
Read this fresh young perspective on my experience with Windows 7*…
*Note that this is from the use of Build Version 7077

With the release of Win7 coming soon, I thought that I’d have to give it a go and see, firsthand, if Win7 is what we’ve all been waiting for. At first glance I began to ooh and ahh over the pretty features and slightly more sleek appearance. Windows Vista had, in general, not done so hot when it came to public opinion. This was clearly stated in an article by InfoWorld, if you care to read that here. The transition from Windows 95 and 98 on up to Windows XP had been a little bit difficult; however, consumers saw that the upgrade outweighed the hassle. That was not the case with Vista, and so now we are coming to a new OS, Windows 7. And while I am no computer connoisseur, I am just about as typical of a user as it gets. I’m heading off to college this fall and use typical applications and apply a fair workload to my PC. After these past months experimenting with Windows7, you can bet I’ll be upgrading this October on my college laptop. It’s faster, smoother, and has a better appearance that all older versions of the Windows OS.

The first thing that caught my eye, was the awesome taskbar. No longer are your items jammed so tightly on the taskbar that, when you have many apps open, you can only see a measly 3 letters of each window. Instead, Win7 has so wisely grouped all of your windows by simply what application they’re running from. Instead of 8 individual windows for all of the e-mails you have open, you have one Microsoft Outlook icon. And when you hover your mouse over this icon, all the outlook windows you have open conveniently display right there in little boxes. This works for all your programs. As you can see below I was on my desktop and had my cursor over the MSFT icon, and it brought up, in a transparent window, all three Outlook windows that I currently had opened. This sort of gave me the idea of how a Mac has a “dock” with little icons of all your running programs. It’s a neat feature and really provides for a clean smooth transition between windows. Another cool feature is when you hover your mouse over one of the three boxes, it provides a closer look and drops off everything else you have open and just shows that window, one click and it brings back all other windows and places the one you’ve selected on top and ready to be used.

When I decided to stop playing with the new exciting taskbar, I moved on to attempt migration of my data from my Windows XP laptop to this new laptop with Win7. I was hesitant to attempt this because I was fearing that all would break loose and I would lose my data or not have everything copy properly. I was so wrong. Windows 7 made it really simple to transfer files. It identified all the data and sorted it accordingly. No folder was left empty and all of it went flush into the right sections. All my pictures, music, and files looked identical to how I had them before on my old laptop. I was rather pleased.

After getting the data I needed, I was surprised and excited to see what other cool features this computer had to offer. Being the girly girl that I am, I went straight to the desktop to search for all the new “Personalize” goodies. I was excited to see that, like Vista, it had the gadgets to place on the desktop. I put up the weather, a calendar, and a clock all adjusted to my time and location. Ok, so that isn’t so exciting for you who are coming from Vista, but if you’ve never had these “gadgets” before, it is cool. Moving on, I got to the personalization section. Windows 7 offers seven awesome “Themes” for your computer to follow, or you can create your own. In a theme, it customizes your desktop, color scheme, everything. Another cool feature is that your desktop background can shuffle pictures. I set it to take pictures from a certain folder, and it changes my desktop to a new picture every day. This adds to the sleek new look of Win7.

If you are moving from XP or older to Win7 you are going to be blessed with a built in search bar in the start menu. It is fantastic and instantly searches your whole computer for anything containing that keyword. You can find programs, documents, emails, etc that contain what you’re looking for. It’s so simple and is right on the bottom of the start menu. You click the Windows icon and then it says “Search Programs and Files,” type in the words you’re looking for and Ta-da! Magic. Also on the start menu, is the capability to go directly to shutdown. On Vista, you click that mischievous button that looks like it would mean shut down, and then you’re stuck in this annoying black hole where you’ve put it to sleep. On Windows 7, “Shut Down” really means shut down. It’s a glorious thing.

Normally, on older Windows versions, you have to manually set everything in order to have a monitor and your laptop displaying your OS. However, with Win7 all I had to do was plug in the monitor and it switched over and I have yet to make changes to it. It remembers these settings and displays just on the laptop when I have taken it home, and when at work and plugged into the monitor it goes right back to the correct settings. It’s a good hassle-free feature.

Also really cool is the ability to highlight any words on any website and click on a little blue arrow – it lets you “obtain driving directions, translate and define words, email content to others, search with ease, and more.*” For information about features and the source of that previous quote check out this site. I’ve found just one issue so far with Windows 7. Granted it could be due to the fact that I’m on an evaluation copy, it bothered me nonetheless. It’s when I’m using I.E. 8, the taskbar often beings to flicker out of control. The only way to stop my seizure-like window flashing is to hover or click the task bar enough places until it stops and returns to its normal functioning ways. It’s just a little annoying.

All in all I have been very pleased with Windows 7 and am greatly looking forward to getting it on my college laptop while I’m down at Arizona State. It’s a great new upgrade from Vista and certainly goes leaps and bounds above XP. It’s attracting more of that hip and cool vibe we are all looking for and is easy to use. When deciding on my computer for college, I was stuck in a dilemma that many of us face: the PC I’d always grown up with and could use with my eyes shut, or the Mac with the awesome interface and that oh-so-popular iChat. Well, I think that Win7 sealed the decision for me and has provided a more tech savvy look and an easier smoother transition that what we saw with Windows Vista. Said and done, with only one noticeable glitch, I give Windows7 a total of 4.5 out of 5 stars

At the recent Symantec ManageFusion 2009, Symantec announced the general availability of Symantec Altiris Client Management Suite Version 7.

One of the new features in Symantec Altiris Client Management Suite Version 7 is support for Intel Centrino 2 with vPro technology's "Fast Call for Help."  The video below by Symantec's Senior Technical Manager Lee Bender is a demonstration of how an end-user would connect back to the Altiris Client Management Suite for remote diagnosis and repair of his notebook even though he connect boot into Windows and is outside of the corporate firewall.

To learn more about Intel's presence at ManageFusion 2009, please go to http://www.intel.com/go/managefusion/

Hello vPro Experts!

I've got something sitting in the back of my mind, that I would like to share with you all. Unfortunately, it's simply a theory, and I have not yet had the opportunity to test it, but I am in the early stages of developing and documenting it, and would really appreciate any feedback, to help make it become a reality.

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The Problem

Are you asking yourself either of these questions?

"How can I reduce the amount of overhead involved with imaging every new client system that comes through the doors, but at the same time, not shift that cost to the vendor?"

or, slightly paraphrased:

"How can I streamline the provisioning of new systems, but at the same time, not sacrifice the flexibility of having in-house imaging?"

If your support teams are imaging each desktop and laptop that is shipped from your hardware vendor, you may have investigated the option of having the vendor pre-image systems prior to shipping them out. There are a couple of caveats to this methodology though. First of all, there is usually an additional cost associated with any sort of customization that the vendor must make to a system. Secondly, if you are using a task sequence-based "imaging" process in-house, then you may not have a way of transferring that process (which is inherently network-reliant), to the vendor. Typically, in this scenario, your operating systems, applications, and Active Directory domain, are all residing on network servers that can't be contacted by the vendor during the process (unless you have some uber-fast, secure VPN link between you and them, in which case you can stop reading).

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The Theoretical Solution (utilizing Intel vPro)

The proposed solution to the problem presented above, is actually a combination of technologies, and custom development work. In this case, I'm going to be working with the following tools:

• Microsoft Configuration Manager SP1 / R2 (R2 for unknown computer OSD support)
  
• Intel vPro / AMT Clients 3.2.1 and greater (4.0, 5.0)
• Microsoft VBscript and/or Windows Powershell
• Microsoft Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI)
• Intel AMT Developer Toolkit (DTK)

Requirements

Here are the requirements for the process:

• Microsoft Configuration Manager SP1
• An Out-of-Band (OOB) service point for ConfigMgr SP1
• “ProvisionServer” DNS record pointing to out-of-band service point
• Collection 1: SCCM collection to temporarily store resource records created by script
• Collection 2: SCCM collection that contains provisioned vPro clients without the ConfigMgr client agent
• ConfigMgr Task Sequence to build vPro system
• ConfigMgr advertisement to link task sequence to Collection 2

Step-by-Step Workflow

This is the theoretical process that would be followed:

1. Physically plug in vPro system – power and network (device remains powered off)
   
2. vPro System obtains IP address and DHCP Option 15 (mydomain.com)
3. vPro System sends “hello packet” to site server (CNAME provisionserver.mydomain.com)
4. Script reads vPro system’s UUID from amtopmgr.log file on site server
5. Script creates Resource Record for system in “Collection 1” with auto-provisioning enabled
1. Use a random name for the hostname (based off of the SMBIOS UUID perhaps)
2. Make sure to refresh the collection membership, or verify that it gets added somehow
6. vPro System sends another hello packet to site server at built-in interval
7. vPro System is recognized as a SCCM resource and provisions
8. Provisioned vPro resource is automatically populated into SCCM “Collection 2”
9. Task sequence begins executing
10. Once the operating system is installed, the device should detect a mismatching hostname between the OS and the ME firmware (this could be configured as part of the task sequence)
11. The device will send a request to the ConfigMgr site server to re-provision the AMT firmware with the new hostname (equivalent of "Update Provisioning Data"?)

Known Issues and Risks

There is at least one known outstanding issue that I'm aware of, and there may be a way to solve it.

Possibility of over-writing an existing system

If an existing, un-provisioned system is not reporting into Configuration Manager properly, it may be incorrectly assumed to be a new, blank system. Therefore, during the build (or imaging) process, an automated check may need to be put into place to verify whether or not the system is truly a new client or not. This could theoretically be done by analyzing the filesystem, or mounting the offline registry hives, and looking for any indicators. Additionally, if a vPro device was already provisioned, it would need to be excluded from being targeted with this process.

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Conclusion

I hope that this overview gives you some ideas about how to automate the provisioning of new enterprise clients using Intel vPro out-of-band provisioning. If you have any suggestions for improvement, I'd be interested in hearing them. If you'd like, you can download a copy of this document below.

Thanks,

Trevor Sullivan

Systems Engineer

OfficeMax Corporation

Hello vPro community!

I rather quickly posted the Powershell code I got functioning yesterday just to make sure that I didn't forget to post it at some point, but if you're new to Powershell, you might not understand everything that's going on here. If I left your head spinning, then I apologize, but tonight, I'm wrapping back around to help describe to you the thought process behind the script I posted!

On top of that, once I put together some notes from earlier today, I will post later on about some of my newest findings! To give you a teaser, I found a method of setting AMT power profiles using Powershell code! I'll be sure to get this posted as soon as I can, but for now, I think it would be most beneficial to understand the basics of connecting to a vPro system.

I'm going to step through the script line-by-line and leave some comments about each of them. Comments will be denoted by lines beginning with a pound sign (#). This is because Powershell uses this character as a "comment" character.

If you're experienced with .NET, then you'll probably either already know about, or want to get familiar with, the tool known as the .NET Reflector. This utility allows you to "reflect" over a .NET library, and discover the objects, methods, and properties that are available to you to use in your Powershell scripts. It's not always a simple task to figure out how to use .NET objects, especially if there is either poor documentation, or none at all, but this tool definitely makes it easier.

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# The following 6 lines are simply variables that we are setting

# to make troubleshooting and customizing our script easier.

# We will be instantiating (creating) an object of the data type

# "AmtSystem" that requires these values as params to its

# constructor method.

# This is the domain\userID we want to authenticate as

$amtusername = "vprodemo\DomainUser"

# This is the password for the user account to authenticate
$amtpassword = "P@SSW0Rd"

# This is the FQDN of the vPro client system we want to connect to
$amthostname = "vproclient.vprodemo.com"

# This is the TCP port that we want to connect to the vPro client on

# TCP 16993 is used for TLS communications to AMT clients

$amtport = 16993

# This parameter determines whether or not your password is

# saved in the AmtSystem object (I think)
$amtrecallpassword = $false

# I haven't verified this, but I believe that this parameter determines

# whether or not WS-MAN is used exclusively on vPro clients

# that support it. Otherwise, it will attempt to use EOI (SOAP).
$amtwebservicesonly = $false

# Next, this variable stores the path to the "Manageability Stack.dll"

# which is included with the Intel AMT Developer Toolkit (DTK).

# Be sure to download the latest version from the Intel website.

# This DLL is a .NET library, written in C#, that provides an API

# to interact with Intel vPro clients.

$manageabilitystack = "C:\Program Files\Intel\Manageability Developer Tool Kit\0.6.08325.2\Manageability Stack.dll"

# This line uses the built-in Assembly class (part of .NET reflection)

# to load the .NET DLL containing the AMT API. The Out-Null Powershell

# cmdlet is used to suppress any console output of the LoadFile() method.

[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadFile("$ManageabilityStack") | Out-Null

# The Write-Host cmdlet is built into Powershell and simply writes

# some text to the console. We are using inline variables to dynamically

# display the information about the client we're connecting to.

Write-Host "Connecting to $amthostname on port $amtport"

# This is the line that's actually getting the object that we will use to

# reference our target Intel AMT client. We are creating a global variable

# name "amtdevice" and setting its value to a "New-Object" of datatype

# ManageabilityStack.AmtSystem (you can use .NET Reflector to find this)

# and then passing the parameters that we defined before to its constructor.

# If the below line wraps in your browser, please be sure to put it all on one line in your script.

$global:amtdevice = New-Object ManageabilityStack.AmtSystem -ArgumentList $amthostname,$amtport,$amtusername,$amtpassword,$amtrecallpassword,$amtwebservicesonly

# Footnote: With respect to variable scope in Powershell, the reason I am

# defining this as a global variable explicitly, is because if you copy and paste

# this code into a script, and then run that script from within an interactive

# Powershell session, the $amtdevice will now be defined as global to the session

# and will not be deleted when the script exits. This allows you to run the script to

# retrieve the device object, but then continue to work with it interactively once

# the connection is established!

# Tell the AmtSystem object that we want to use TLS

$amtdevice.UseTls = $true

# Enable WS-MAN support (if available) on the connection
$amtdevice.WsManSupport = $true

# Once we've set up all of our configuration options about the connection,

# this next line actually establishes the connection.

$amtdevice.Connect()

# The "State" property of the AmtSystem object is "Connecting" until the

# connection either succeeds or fails. We want to monitor the status until

# this occurs.

while ($amtdevice.State -eq "Connecting") { Start-Sleep 1 }

# Finally, once the connection either succeeds or fails, we write out the

# State property to the console so that we know what the outcome was.

Write-Host "AMT device is in state $($amtdevice.State.ToString())"

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So, there you have it. That is the code, with my comments inline. If you have any questions or feedback on my articles, please feel free to comment on this blog article. I will try my best to answer them, although please understand that I am still working on comprehending this great API! If this is useful to any of you, I would like to know that, and if not, then please recommend something that you would like to hear about!

As promised, I will eventually write another follow-up article on how you can set Management Engine (ME) power profiles on a provisioned AMT client remotely, using Powershell! Until next time ...

Happy Powershell Scripting!!

Trevor Sullivan

Systems Engineer

OfficeMax Corporation