August 2013 was Automation Month at the Building Clouds Blog!

Augomation? Autogust? Augustomania?

Whatever you call it, with 16 Automation Track / Automation Track adjacent posts, it was Automation’s month to shine.

You may have not even realized it – heck, I don’t think we did...

The Posts…

If you have been keeping up, fantastic! If you haven’t, well, we have a bunch of links for you (listed chronologically):

• Aug.06.2013 - Enabling web applications synthetic transactions as a service
• Aug.06.2013 - Deployment–PDT 2.5 is now available on the TechNet Gallery
• Aug.09.2013 - Automation–An Introduction to Service Management Automation
• Aug.12.2013 - Automation – Orchestrator Back to Basics – Use Cases Spotlight (1 of 5)
• Aug.12.2013 - Automation–Orchestrator Run .Net Script Activity–Unexpected Data Flattening Behavior Workaround
• Aug.12.2013 - Project MAT for Shift (Part 2) – Networking
• Aug.14.2013 - Automation–SMA–Getting Started with SMA Runbooks
• Aug.15.2013 - Automation–SMA Runbook Spotlight–Exchange Distribution List Creation
• Aug.21.2013 - Automation–SMA Runbook Spotlight–Virtual Machine Startup by Priority (Part 1)
• Aug.27.2013 - Automation–SMA Tip/Trick–Leveraging InlineScript and $Using:Variable with PowerShell Workflow
• Aug.27.2013 - Automation–SMA–Utility Runbook Spotlight–VMM Custom Property Management
• Aug.27.2013 - Automation–SMA Runbook Spotlight–Virtual Machine Startup by Priority (Part 1.5)
• Aug.29.2013 - Automation–SMA Runbook Spotlight–Virtual Machine Startup by Priority (Part 2)
• Aug.29.2013 - MAT 1.5 is available (now with NIC recreation!)
• Aug.29.2013 - Automation–SMA–Utility Runbook Spotlight–Get-SC-Product-Versions
• Aug.30.2013 - Introducing PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC)

Note All the System Center 2012 R2 Service Management Automation (SMA) posts have been collected in one place: https://aka.ms/IntroToSMA

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The TechNet Contributions…

(Free Solution Example Downloads)

Accompanying the vast selection of blog posts above, sit the 8 TechNet Gallery Contributions for the month of August 2013 (again, listed chronologically):

• Aug.06.2013 - PowerShell Deployment Toolkit 2.5.2500
• Aug.06.2013 - Creating Synthetic transactions and dashboards - Sample Orchestrator Runbook
• Aug.12.2013 - Sample Runbooks - Automation Use Cases
• Aug.15.2013 - SMA Example - Build Exchange Distribution List (w/PowerShell v3 Workflow)
• Aug.21.2013 - SMA Example - Virtual Machine Startup by Priority (w/PowerShell v3 Workflow)
• Aug.27.2013 - SMA Example - VMM Custom Property Management (w/PowerShell v3 Workflow)
• Aug.28.2013 - Migration Automation Toolkit (MAT)
• Aug.29.2013 - SMA Example - Virtual Machine Startup by Priority Group (w/PS v3 Workflow)

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It has been a great month – not just for Automation, but the Building Clouds Blog as a whole. I want to personally thank each and every one of its contributors – I think everyone can agree, our content makes a difference!

enJOY!

Comments

• Anonymous
  October 16, 2013
  Thanks for the effort folks. Your posts really make a difference to us out here in the field. These posts fill in the knowledge gap between a) the product configuration forms, technet/msdn reference and how-to-material, and b) customer feature requirements.   Regards, Chris

• Anonymous
  October 17, 2013
  @chrisfgn - Thank you for the kind words. We are pleased to hear that our posts make such a positive impact with the community!

• Anonymous
  October 17, 2013
  @chrisfgn I completely agree with Charles - this type of feedback is awesome thank you (and anything that you see missing :)).  Some exciting stuff coming very soon!