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Monthly Archives: April 2019

Making Your Helpdesk Even Easier to Access with SCCM

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I love customizing the help button in apps to point to our helpdesk. Of course, I was excited to see that SCCM’s Software Center includes a new way to add external resources to it. Customizing this can let your staff access items, like your helpdesk, through a single click.

At the bottom of the picture below, you can see a custom link that is named Technology Helpdesk. When a user clicks on this link, the custom URL is loaded within the Software Center window. Because it points to a helpdesk, users can quickly submit a trouble ticket. This is useful if a user initiated install fails to complete as they can submit a ticket within that same window.

To add a custom tab to Software Center, make sure that your SCCM environment is on 1806 or greater. Next, edit your Client Settings – select Software Center – select Customize.

In the Customize window that pops up, select the Tabs tab.[note]That was just fun to type![/note] Specify your tab name and the URL that should be loaded.

Run a Machine Policy Retrieval on a client and re-launch Software Center if it was open. Just like that, you made it a bit easier for everyone to submit a helpdesk request!

Creating Outlook Holiday Files to Import Work Calendars

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In education, we have about a dozen different work year calendars. Administration are here year round, teachers work 190 days, paraprofessionals are scheduled a bit less, and the list goes on.

Outlook holiday files provide an easy way to import our work year calendar so that events show up on our Outlook calendar.

While there are a few different ways to create calendar events in Exchange / Office 365, I prefer using Outlook holiday files because they are:

  • User driven: the end user selects the event groups that they want to see.
  • Simple: a holiday file is just a text document that Office Outlook can import.

To create your own holiday file, download this template or paste the contents into a TXT file.

At the top of the file, you will see a header for the first event group, [12 Month Admin, 2019-2020]. This group has 34 entries with it. Line 2 starts with the first event name, Holiday, followed by the event date.

To keep things simple, I don’t use actual holiday names and instead just write Holiday. The first screenshot at the top of this page show how lines 2-5 look on my Outlook calendar.

In your text file, scroll down to line 36 and to see the next event group, [Teachers, 2019-2020].

Outlook holiday files are simple. A header is needed for each event group. The header should include the number of events followed by a comma. Below the header is an event on a separate line. This continues until you reach a new event group/header.

That is all there is to an Outlook holiday file. I find it easier to start with our year round employee calendar and then use it to start all of the other event groups (cutting out the lines that I don’t need).

After all of the event groups have been created, rename the file so that it has a .HOL extension. Open Microsoft Office Outlook and then double click on it. You should see a prompt to import the event groups, check any that you want.

This file can be emailed out. Your staff can import their events by just double clicking on the attachment, checking their event group, and pressing OK.

When new work calendars are approved the next year, copy your old file and do a fine/replace to update dates. The whole process takes me about 15 minutes each year.