Monitor Active Directory Security Group membership changes

In many environments permission to add members to strong security groups (lets say Domain Admins group) is granted to many users.
Sometime those permissions are getting out of hand, so audit those group membership become vital.
In this post I would like to demonstrate how to audit security groups with build-in tools.

First step
Enable Audit account management to success in default domain controller policy (enabled by default):

Query Daylight Saving Time information with SCCM

Many system administrators regularly get asked about computers Daylight Saving Time (DST) information in there network.
With SCCM you can easily get that information with simple query and add it to collection.

First, to get time zone information we need to add Time Zone class to hardware inventory in the relevant client settings:
 

Automatic Client Upgrade for SCCM cumulative update

Since Microsoft started to release cumulative updates for SCCM, we had to deploy package to Client in order to keep the clients up to date. automatic client upgrade was exclusively saved for major updates (like service packs).
Microsoft recognize the need to automatic upgrade the Clients after installing cumulative update to the site server as well.

The last cumulative update (Cumulative Update 1 for System Center 2012 R2 Configuration Manager Service Pack 1 and System Center 2012 Configuration Manager Service Pack 2) that was released earlier this month, add the ability to automatically updating the clients.

When choosing to automatically update the clients, the following will happen:

• Client package will be update.
• The update will be sent to existing clients (based on Automatic Client Upgrade settings).
• New client installations (via push\manual\OSD etc.) will include the update automatically.

The option to create packages is still available but will be less usable. 

Manually deploy Software Updates to servers using SCCM

As we all know, ADR (Automatic Deployment Rule) can be configured to automatically deploy software updates to collection.
When ADR runs and finds new updates, it adds the updates to existing Software Update Group or create new Software Update Group (depend on you ADR settings):

Add custom column to SCCM console using SCCM Console Builder

Editing SCCM console views are quit limited, there is no way to add column to collection that doesn't exist in the list available classes:

In order to add custom column (in this example, an IP Address column) we need to create a new custom node using Console Builder tool.