Wait! What? Two versions releasing at once? That doesn’t make sense.
Let me explain. Behind the scenes WAC extensions are identified by a string identifier that the author makes up to reflect the purpose of the extension. When I initially started this extension, I was a young PFE working on a product called System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM). Time has moved on and the product is now called Microsoft Endpoint Management Configuration Manager (MEMCM or MECM). I use just CM in most cases now. This now old and grumpy PFE CE CSA-E wanted to get rid of the final SCCM references in the extension, which included its name, “SCCM.Control-Panel”. v1.2.5 is an update to “SCCM.Control-Panel”. It adds nothing more than a banner telling you that it is EOL and to go get the new version.
The actual new version is v 1.5.0, which has the extension id of “CM.Control-Panel”. That two character change breaks the association between the versions.
With that covered, let’s dive into what has changed.
First, there has been a slight name change in the UI as well. Instead of being “Configuration Manager Client”, it is not “Configuration Manager Client / Tools” to signify that the extension has gwon beyond the initial capabilities of replicating the control panel applet.
lot of improvements to the underlying PowerShell, improving speed. The issue of pages not loading due to delays getting the information back is (mostly) a thing of the past.
Some pages/tabs left their suffix on the URL and navigation could get a bit confusing. That is now resolved and you see the base URL for extension.
Both the Software Center and Deployment Monitoring Tool display of applications were showing apps that were not deployed, but marked as installable via a task sequence. I have now filtered those out.
Misc bug fixes.
The remaining items I am going to give a little more info on, so they’ll get headers and images.
My PowerShell code is now available for you to pick apart.
When in the extension, click the PowerShell icon on the top bar and you will see all the scripts I wrote to do the behind the scenes work of the extension. I did not do a great job standardizing my naming convention, but it is good enough that you should be able to find what you are looking for. Maybe some of the code in there will be useful to you. If you have a better way to do something, please share with me.
Localization
The strings from the actual CM product have been pulled in and if you run WAC in a language other than English, you should now see localized strings for at least the control panel pages. Beyond that, the different languages are in various stages of getting their strings completed and many have a few (or a lot) of English strings still included. If you see an English string surrounded by strings of the language you have selected, odds are I missed it, please let me know. If you see strings that are not clear or should be worded differently, please let me know. I have had a few people help but I have used Microsoft Translate way more than I would like. If you are fluent in any of the languages included and would like to help, I would be most appreciative.
Bitlocker
If you use CM to manage Bitlocker, you can now see the compliance status and do simple encrypt/decrypt, suspend/resume tasks. You will see two compliance statuses, one if the CM baseline used for Bitlocker, the other is the MBAM status from WMI. The WMI entry updates fairly quick, but the baseline does not update until the next time it is evaluated, so in some cases you could see a mismatch here. I initially started including what settings had made it in to the registry of the client, but decided that may be too much. I pared it back to decoding any non-compliant reasons given by MBAM. You can still see much of the code from the settings harvest as I simply commented it out int he PowerShell in case I decided to revive it.
User Profiles
Having a few customers that have certain devices that are shared by many people, the profiles can get out of control over time. You can now see what profiles are on a system delete them individually, or by age. You will see what account(s) is/are logged in and idle time if they are idle. You can even send the user a message if there was a need to. When you first load the page, profile sizes are not populated as that scan can take some time if there are a lot of profiles or large profiles. A single button click and that information will be requested and it is cached as long as you are connected to that system, even if going to other tabs and back. If an account is unknown (defined in wmi but not in AD), it is highlighted. If a profile directory is orphaned (directory exists but no matching profile in WMI) it is also highlighted.
UEFI
For Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Microsoft Surface devices, you can now see UEFI info. I included basic info about the UEFI version and when it was released as well as the exposed settings and their values.
There is not currently the ability to change any settings, but it could be added if people thought it would be useful.
NOTE: Dell systems require the “DellBIOSProvider” PowerShell module. If you connect to a Dell system and the module is not there, you will be prompted to install. You can also pre-deploy it to all Dell systems as an application.
