Gateway and OOMADS

I just did a Gateway server install last week and really appreciated the new SP1 MOMCertImport tool which brings up a GUI and shows the certificate. You just need to highlight it and press OK. Much better than before with all the exporting and command line stuff.

I did notice that the two DCs had errors and a quick check confirmed that the AD Helper objects (oomads.msi) had not been installed. As there were only 2 DCS I installed them manually. So it was nice to see that Kevin Holman just posted an article on the same issue. I did not see that problem mentioned in the documents I have about installing the Gateway server. In fact Microsoft’s own Deployment white paper does not even mention oomads.msi which is strange for a paper on deployment. Hopefully another one to add to the fix list for SP2. 

Another helper object is MOMAspNet.msi but it only exists in the x86 directory and not the AMD64 directory. I have not found much information on this and when it should be used – especially when doing manual installs. So if anyone has info on this I would appreciate it. Thanks.

Authoring Console Quick Tips

If you are using the Authoring Console to create a custom MP then you can run it as a stand alone system without having any other OpsMgr components. Although it does not tell you up front, it does do a prerequisite check and fails if they are not met. But it does show you in the end the same way that an OpsMgr install does.

 
And the requirements are very similar to other OpsMgr components. If you are unsure why you should use the Authoring Console to create rules rather than the OpsMgr Console then read Steve Rachui’s post.

One tip if you are using registry keys to do discovery. Just use the key starting after HKLM and do not include that bit. So it would be Software\MyApp. It does show HKLM at the side but I copied the key in regedit and it put the whole key in. Then I scratched my head for a while wondering why the server was not discovered. It is not as simple as creating an Attribute and then a group as in MOM 2005 but I  am getting the hang of it.

Another little gotcha is if you want to include product knowledge. As in the console, you will need Visual Studio for Office Runtime installed as well as Word.

Note that there is a later version called Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Second Edition Runtime (VSTO 2005 SE) (x86). This is at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=F5539A90-DC41-4792-8EF8-F4DE62FF1E81&displaylang=en

The first version was for Office/Word 2003 but this version allows you to use Office/Word 2007 as well.

There is a v3 version but that is for Office 2007 and VS 2008 combinations.