Category: system center

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System Center Desktop Error Monitoring (SCDEM)


SCDEM is the newest addition to the MDOP family and it’s a corker!

What does it do?

SCDEM captures all application & OS failures across your enterprise and stores them in one central location, to enable your technicians to track, monitor and pro-actively respond to issues.

This is like a local version of the “Send error report to Microsoft” box you sometimes get when apps crash and hang. While it’s good for MS to have this information, in a larger enterprise it’s more immediately useful for the in-house IT team to have it. This way they can identify error trends and match them up to recent changes they’ve made to the network, desktops, 3rd party software etc-thus quickly identifying, and (hopefully) fixing, the problem.

It also enables you to create a company specific knowledge base of fixes for errors.

Advantages of SCDEM

Increase productivity of users: Once SCDEM has been running for a while, IT will have had a chance to identify and correct the vast majority of common issues. That means that there will be less errors on the desktops and thus less downtime for users. The internal knowledge base will also make it easier for end users to be pro-active and solve their own issues without having to log a ticket with the help desk.

Easy Deployment: Due to it using the standard Windows error reporting system, all it takes to get SCDEM deployed to however many 1000’s of PC’s you have with a single Group Policy in Active Directory-nice huh? 🙂

Advanced Reporting: SCDEM provides many different reports to show which applications crash most, when they crash etc so that IT can make well informed decisions when it comes to patching and fixing.

For anyone who is using SCDEM and having problems, I’ve just found a great whitepaper on Troubleshooting this program. Download here. The Technet blog post is here.

If you head over to this Technet blog, you can see a great video of SCDEM in action-here.

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Application Virtualization (App-V)


Microsoft App-V is what was formerly known as SoftGrid and it’s some pretty clever stuff 🙂

It’s main feature is to virtualize applications, this isolates them on the users workstation and reduces application conflicts-thus reducing end user downtime. However the apps can still fully interact with each other such as copy & paste etc so still giving the users the experience they’re used to.

The latest version is 4.5 and major highlights include:

  • HTTP streaming. Support for streaming virtual applications from an IIS server (v6 or v7) providing dramatic performance and scalability improvements for large App-V deployments.
  • Re-designed Sequencer. Simplifies the process and reduces the complexity of creating virtual application packages.
  • Dynamic Suite Composition (DSC) for MSI packages. Consolidate virtual environments, control virtual application interaction, enable faster, easier administration.
  • Seamless integration with System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R2. Allows customers to easily deploy virtual applications through the System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R2 infrastructure and scale their deployments.
  • Client cache improvements. The maximum size of the client cache has been increased to 1 TB.
  • Improved Manageability. Integration and support for VSS writer, Operations Manager management pack, ADM template.
  • Accessibility. The product is now Section 508 compliant, bringing App-V in line with Microsoft shipping requirements.

    • Most conversations I have with schools include App-V as they often have odd bits of software like “Science for GCSE 1997” and “Maths is brilliant V 2.3” that don’t play nice with each other-and App-V is a great way to solve that.

    See the Technet MDOP page here.

    Advantages of using App-V:

  • Streams applications on demand over the Internet or via the corporate network to desktops, terminal servers, and laptops.
  • Automates and simplifies the application management lifecycle by significantly reducing regression and application interoperability testing.
  • Accelerates Windows and application deployments by reducing the image footprint.
  • Reduces the end-user impacts associated with application upgrades, patching, and terminations. No reboots required, no waiting for applications to install, and no need to uninstall when retiring applications.
  • Enables controlled application use when users are completely disconnected.
  • Integrates with System Center Configuration Manager to enable physical and virtual deployments through the same people, process and technologies.

    • Licensing:

    It needs to be noted that there are 2 version of App-V available to buy.

    App-V as part of MDOP: For use in standard environments.

    App-V for Terminal Services: For use in Terminal Service environments only. App-V’s application virtualization allows any application to run alongside any other—even applications that normally conflict, multiple versions of the same application, and many applications that previously could not run under Terminal Services.

    Terminal Services

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