Anyone know a good way to go about setting up deferment to be handled by the toolkit only rather than both toolkit and SCCM?
Scenario: Currently I am using a recurring schedule in SCCM 2012 that runs the install once every hour, but only runs if the previous one did not complete so there are no duplicate attempts on success. To minimize downtime, our users are pre-informed via mass email that the install will kick off at noon on a specific day and that they will have a single deferment of one hour available.
Problem: User powers on their computer around 2:45pm and receives the welcome window meant to display at noon. User wishes to defer one hour as promised and clicks the Defer button. Since the SCCM recurring install is every hour beginning at noon, the install begins at 3pm rather than waiting an hour from 2:45. This is frustrating to the user, because they likely just powered on their machine, received the install welcome, clicked Defer, then opened a ton of apps to begin working for what they hope is nearly an hour, but is only 15 minutes.
Another big reason for the requested change is that we need to use SCCM to set the install to recur every day at noon while still allowing the user a 20 min / 1hr / 2hr defer at each daily install attempt. SCCM alone does not seem to allow this so we need to have the user selected deferral within the toolkit only.
Planned solution: Please offer any suggestions if there is a better way, but what I have so far planned to do is replace the panel of Continue, Defer, etc buttons with a dropdown menu that permits the user to defer 20 min, 1 hr, or 2 hr. Once they have set their preference, the script will be told to sleep for the relative number of seconds, then run when that time is up, hence keeping all deferment within the toolkit.
Thanks very much in advance for any advice or assistance.
To clarify if necessary, this is a snip from the toolkit admin guide that explains what I have set up:
• Set a recurring schedule for the Mandatory Assignment. This dictates how frequently the application should attempt to install. Additionally, ensure that “Rerun if failed previous attempt” is enabled. These settings are required when using the deferral system and ensure that if a user defers the install, the install will retry after the specified interval.
I’m hoping to make this above mentioned recurring SCCM deployment occur every 1 day while also making the defer button in the app permit the user to defer 20m, 1hr, or 2hrs.
I was thinking of something like, "If $defer = “1hr” { Start-Sleep -s 3600 } so the script would just pause for an hour and then run the window with a 5 minute countdown. Not really sure where to put this though, or how extensive it might be.
Nope, no full solution yet, although I am thinking of in the meantime re-purposing the “close apps” button as a “wait 1 hour” button and attaching it to a timer to give them a single one hour countdown as a deferment within the package. Then we can still keep the daily recurring schedule from SCCM.
then i guess, i have to use packages instead for apllication in this case, it can be easly done with Packages, just configure the recurrence schedule. With Applications i need to reconfigure a client-setting to get a similar user experience and i don´t want to do it…
So, we hope that the option will come with the next update
I achieved this by creating an extension that triggers an Application Evaluation Cycle after the specified time of when the users defers. You can use it with other actions too. So, as long as the machine remains in the collection of that Application another attempt will be made after the specified time.
