For almost two years now I have worked for 1E and seen first-hand how much this organization cares for the systems management community. It is one of the major reasons I came here and why I am very proud to call 1E my professional home and extended family (no, seriously). However, one of the things I remember from back in my CM admin days was the 1E which supplied free tools and wondered why they were gone and it seems I was not alone in this quandary. I understood after interacting internally here that this was not just a simple a change within 1E, but a change in the CM community itself.
With laying MMS to rest back in 2013 (you are missed, dear friend) and the advent of Configuration Manager 2012 alongside very strong changes in how our sector of the IT industry functioned, things were and are still bit up in the air. 1E has been strongly investing in our community in a not-so-public a way for a while now and I did not fully understand it until I started my job as a Solutions Engineer here back in August of 2013. The company is working very diligently to discern where enterprise IT is headed, influencing trend, and deeply retooling how our technology provides an amplified toolset to deliver on the ever increasing needs/wants of an elusive “end user”. Even the perception of what the true goals are in today’s world for IT organizations has been top of mind and these discoveries have concatenated down to tremendous gains in our tech.
So while we (and I cannot tell you how proud I am to use that “we” statement BTW) have made a ton of headway which is evidenced within our technology stack. It is now time to bolster our public community efforts and give as much support as we possibly can to efforts like the Midwest Management Summit, CM User Group involvement, and last but not least – bringing back our FREE TOOLS! These pure, community driven efforts are what made the early years of MMS so special, everyone knows this, so we have made the conscious decision to keep things this way.
If you take a look at our free tools page, we are off to a great start but these tools need to be shared entirely, grown, and refined to better systems management. That is exactly how we are going to approach this, meaning each of our free tools will also have a discussion section within our forum page hosted on myITforum. Within this resource, anyone and everyone is welcome to share what is working well with these tools and more importantly, what is not so we can work together to keep improving. Lastly, tell us your thoughts on this, start a thread, and let's find out together what else can 1E do for the community, as that is the whole point!
While we are on that point, I've picked out just two of the selection of fantastic free tools, which I am really excited about –
1E Enforcement (Official Release end of February 2015) – This free tool allows for “required” ConfigMgr 2012 Application Deployments to be “selectively” enforced, maintaining the ability to remove the application if required in the future, without the administrative overhead of altering the targeting method via collection exclusions or membership query-rule. Take a closer look here, then go discuss it here.
1E Magic Test – Has your environment been configured properly for WakeOnLan? This tool will help you find out if you are right or not then provide standard testing against any possible issues down the road. Take a closer look here, then go discuss it here.