Last night for us Europeans there was another ConfigMgr Technical Preview release and this time its version 1710. There are many new great features indroduced to this Technical Preview and the full overview you can find over at Microsoft.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sccm/core/get-started/capabilities-in-technical-preview-1710

In this post I will focus on one of the things that i find the most exciting in regards to the Run Script feature which is a way to almost in real-time execute powershell scripts directly on clients.

See my other posts on this feature if you need to get up to speed on what it is and how to use it:

http://blog.ctglobalservices.com/powershell/tan/how-to-activate-the-new-feature-run-powershell-scripts-from-the-configmgr-console-on-current-branch-1706/

http://blog.ctglobalservices.com/powershell/tan/create-and-run-scripts-with-the-new-feature-run-powershell-scripts-from-the-configmgr-console-on-current-branch-1706/

https://timmyit.com/2017/09/18/baseline-evaluation-with-run-script-feature-in-configmgr-1706/

The Wizard

One of the big updates here is the wizard and the ability to get realtime output to show up in the wizard during execution of the script.

When executing the script you will see a green statusbar that indicates that somethings i happening and under that you know have box that will populate with data onces the client have runned the script and reported back which just takes a few seconds.

(Side note, The script I’m running below is just a Ping to localhost on each client)

One of the options you have is the “Script details” found in the botton left corner and here you will se information like “Script name, Script Version, Last modified Time, Collection ID”

In the middle you have “Summary” which is the default one you will see and from here you can change how you want to view the data.

The data you can view is

Script output

Script Exit code

and you can view them as

Bar Chart

Pie Chart

Data table

You can also view this information on scripts you ran histroically if you go to Monitoring -> Script Status and right-click and than click on Show status (You will also able to preview the some information in the lower part of the console)

After clicking on Show Status you will get prompted by this windows containing all the info we saw in the Wizard when executing the script and can sort the data in the same way.

Parameters

The next thing i want to showcase is the Parameter functionallity which gives us the ability to specify a parameter when executing the script towards a collection. Here we are creating a new script which is called “Ping Parameter”

and in this script we will add a parameter and then do a ping with a variable based on that parameter.

Once clicking “Next” we get option to Edit the Parameter

From here we can change a few options like Data Type, required true or false etc. Also able to add a Description that will show up later when executing the script.

Once configured click next and then you have to approve the script as always. Next step is to run the script and when we do that we get the following option now to enter a parameter. In this case we need to enter the computer name we want to ping with the ping script we just created.

The description box shows the information we wrote earlier telling the user who executes the script some information about the parameter and what they need to enter.

We run the script and gets prompted with information as expected

but if we check under “Script Details” we find additional information on the parameter we entered

These are really cool additions to this great feature and I’m really happy that the ConfigMgr team just keep on working on it and add functionallity. Hopefully we can see some of these changes to the pre-release feature in the next ConfigMgr CB build.

That’s all for now and until next time, cheers !

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