SMS no more

We always joke about it, SMS (Slow Moving Sofware). We want as much live data as possible in our ConfigMgr environments, but we can’t get hold of it because trying to force through machine policy at a faster rate than what we recommend, or tweaking collection evaluations too aggressively, is eventually going to cause some serious impact in your environment.

The product group are aware that we want data quicker than ever, the BGB fast channel has been around for a while now, since 2012 SP1 in fact, but it’s only really since Current Branch that development can grow and new features can be introduced take advantage of this channel.

A couple of examples of fast channel in CB are the online status of devices in the console, and the run scripts feature.

With SCCM Technical Preview 1805, a new in-console feature called CMPivot has been introduced that will give us data in real time, data that can be consumed for reporting purposes, or something that can be acted upon to remediate situations quickly.

You can access CMPivot from a collection in the console, by right-clicking and selecting the tool from the menu, or from the ribbon.

The CMPivot interface presents us with search bar where we can enter queries and also a comprehensive list of commands, operators and functions we can use to probe against our devices.

The format for our queries is

entity | operator1 | operator2 | …

so the tool gives us the example

Device | where Manufacturer like '%Microsoft%'

Below is a screenshot of the available entities available, fire up CMPivot to get more information on these.

In action, we can get information back very fast. In my test, I wanted to report back devices with MBAM installs.

The great thing about CMPivot, is that you can then integrate further. If I right-click, I can choose further actions from the context menu. Take a look at some of those and start to get a feel of what you can use this tool for, and the impact it is going to have in your day-to-day role.

This is one feature of the latest Tech Preview that I really hope hits in the 1806 release of ConfigMgr.