Stuff Made by Smart People to Help Make Your Life Easier – Part Four

Have you had enough yet?  How about some Right Click Tools?  How about some more Right Click Tools?  These are cool additions for the Configuration Manager console but consider this before you install them in their default state.  Do you want to provide the full set of tools to anyone who has access to the Configuration Manager console?  Maybe, maybe not.  These are powerful tool sets but in most cases probably go beyond what you would ever need.  Fortunately, you can edit the underlying structure of the tool sets to remove the dangerous parts, no need to be running around with scissors, and still have some useful bits.  For example, as Jörgen Nilsson and Stefan Schörling brought up during their demo at TechEd do you really need to be providing a way to shutdown full collections in one fell swoop?  Probably not.

So what you might like to do is edit the underlying xml files to remove some of the potentially career impacting functionality of the right click tools so malicious or accidental actions like shutting down collections, rebooting collections, or uninstalling agents just aren’t there to happen.  In the sub-folders of the Configuration Manager console installation there are folders that correspond to the GUIDs which represent locations in the console.  Under these foldrs are xml files that can be changed to fit your requirements.

There’s a lot more out there to see, what I’ve posted is just a toe in the ocean of what people in the Configuration Manager community have created to make life easier for those of us lucky enough to be working in this field.  There’s also a nice wiki page available as well that lists all of the goodies.

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