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Microsoft Press: These unique (and free) ebooks bring System Center experts together to discuss designing, deploying, and troubleshooting some of the most complex and mission critical aspects of key System Center capabilities.

The second title in this series, Microsoft System Center: Configuration Manager Field Experience (ISBN 9780735683044) by Rushi Faldu, Manish Raval, Brandon Linton, Kaushal Pandey and the System Center series editor Mitch Tulloch, is now available here. This title’s companion content is here. The Mobi and ePub files are also available. If you’d like to order a print version of this free ebook, you can do so here.

Taken from the book’s Introduction, here’s how the authors describe the content of this particular title:

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Introduction

The purpose of this book is to provide System Center 2012 Configuration Manager administrators with helpful and tested real-world guidance from consultants and product experts at Microsoft. We want you to get the most out of using Configuration Manager in your environment regardless of whether the task at hand is querying the Configuration Manager database for system information, creating and customizing reports, or deploying operating system images to client machines.

The book is divided into the following three parts:

• Part 1: WMI for System Center 2012 Configuration Manager administrators is designed to familiarize you with basic WMI concepts and tools, show you how to use WMI classes to create Configuration Manager queries, and help you understand the underlying database design of Configuration Manager so you can create custom reports for querying the information you need.
• Part 2: System Center 2012 Configuration Manager reporting is designed to familiarize you with SSRS and show you how to integrate SSRS with Configuration Manager 2012 and to customize and create new reports using SSRS.
• Part 3: Configuration Manager deployment tips provides tips that cover a wide variety of different scenarios to help you ensure the success of your deployments.

The target audience for this book is administrators who have at least three years experienced working with previous versions of Configuration Manager and who have begun deploying and using Configuration Manager 2012 in their environment.

Title: Microsoft System Center: Designing Orchestrator Runbooks
ISBN: 9780735682986
Download the PDF version of this title (186 pgs, 8.77MB) here and the companion content here (296 KB). The EPUB version is here and the MOBI version here.
If you prefer a hard copy of the book, you can order it here from our official distributor, O’Reilly Media, for $9.99.

There is a Free ebook available for download offering from Microsoft Press. These unique (and free) ebooks bring System Center experts together to discuss designing, deploying, and troubleshooting some of the most complex and mission critical aspects of key System Center capabilities.

The third title in this series, Microsoft System Center: Troubleshooting Configuration Manager (ISBN 9780735683020) by Rushi Faldu, Manoj Kumar Pal, Andre Della Monica, Kaushal Pandey, and the System Center series editor Mitch Tulloch, is now available.

Introduction

As the authors of this book, we have tried provide you with insights and tips on troubleshooting System Center 2012 Configuration Manager drawn from our insider knowledge and real-world field experience.  While most of you who are Configuration Manager administrators are fairly comfortable with the product and can perform common management tasks, many of you still have pain points when it comes to certain aspects of how the product works. Based on our observations and interactions with customers, the biggest knowledge gaps tend to be in the following areas:

• Troubleshooting common Configuration Manager tasks such as software distribution, software updates, and deployment.
• Understanding how the various components of Configuration Manager on both the server and client side work together when such tasks are performed.
• Dealing with the enormous number of log files that are generated on both the server and client side of Configuration Manager.

This book is our attempt to address some of these gaps and pain points. Chapter 1 provides insights into the Configuration Manager architecture and deployment principles. Chapter 2 familiarizes you with some of the key components of Configuration Manager and how they interact with each other when performing common tasks by using verbose logging for tracing the actions of various components. And Chapter 3 examines how to troubleshoot various Configuration Manager functionality including software and application deployment, site-to-site replication, software update and patching, operating system deployment, and Mac client issues.

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