A first look at the Configuration Manager Community Hub

After the official announcement on availability earlier this week, it is time to have a first look at the Configuration Manager Community Hub.

What is the Configuration Manager Community hub?

The Configuration Manager Community hub is the one stop shop where Configuration Manager administrators can share useful content like scripts, reports, applications, tasks sequences and Configuration Items. No more re-inventing the wheel or searching the web for smart solutions built by experts – the content will now be available and accessible directly from the Configuration Manager console.

The release announcement states that initially the content will be uploaded only by Microsoft, but in the future community contributors should be able to upload their own content using their GitHub account as well.

How to get the Configuration Manager Community hub?

First things first: to use the Community Hub you will need to run Configuration Manager Current Branch version 2002 (or later). You will also need to run the console on a device running Windows 10 build 17110 (or higher) that has .NET Framework 4.6 (or higher) installed.

The Community Hub is accessible from the console and through a dedicated Community workspace. This workspace has been around for a while and up until now only contained a reference to the Configuration Manager documentation.

To light up the Community Hub in the workspace, the feature first needs to be enabled. This is done via the administration workspace. Simply select the Community Hub from the features list, right-click and Turn On the feature.

Once the feature is enabled the Hub becomes available in the community workspace.

Getting content from the hub

To wrap-up this article let’s see how getting content from the Hub works. As an example we will use the Query Device Architecture script.

To get the script first click the tile and then click the download button. A message is shown indicating the download was successful.  

Note that the download is now also listed in the Your Downloads section. 

The actual script can then be found in the scripts node in the Software Library workspace, where it is waiting for approval. The hierarchy in the lab is configured so the script authors do not require an additional approval so it can be approved immediately. In a few clicks the script was ready for use!

That concludes our first look at the Configuration Manager Community Hub. More details on this feature can be found in the Configuration Manager product documentation.

I am really happy this feature was released and I am looking forward to the further evolution and great content being shared. What is your opinion? Please leave a comment and share your thoughts!