Installation guide

To preserve the user-friendly name, use the task name as the element name for the task rows. When you
create a collection filter that uses your script, you must select the incremental duplicate handling option so
that the collection process includes an incremental entry in the list of entries where the same task name
appears multiple times.
For example, in a sample test environment, many Windows machines had more than one task named
GoogleUpdateTaskMachineCore. A PowerShell script can label the rows as Task1, Task2, and so on. If
you delete Task1, Task2 becomes Task1, and VCM displays multiple change details for Task1, such as the
command line and the next run time. This report would be incorrect because even though Task 1 would
have changed place in the sequence, the task would not have changed.
The task names are labeled accordingly.
n
The first task entry is labeled GoogleUpdateTaskMachineCore.
n
The second task entry is labeled GoogleUpdateTaskMachineCore_1.
Because task names can contain characters that are not valid in XML element names, VCM encodes the
task names with the ToCMBase64String function. If you reorder the list of tasks whose names are
identical, VCM can still report extra changes. For this reason, require the VCM user interface to display the
friendly task names.
Enclose Values that Can Contain XML Syntax in CDATA
When you develop your custom PowerShell scripts to collect the Windows Custom Information data type
from VCM managed Windows machines, you must use CDATA to enclose values that contain XML
syntax.
For example:
function wrapInCDATA( [string]$input_string)
{
[string]$wrappedInCDATA | out-null
if ( $input_string.Length -gt 0 )
{
$wrappedInCDATA = ("<!" + "[CDATA" + "[" + $input_string + ("]" + "]" + ">")
)
}
return $wrappedInCDATA
}
PowerShell Script Signing Policies
With PowerShell 2.0 you can set the script signing policies at the machine, user, and process levels. The
process level runs a single execution of powershell.exe.
In VCM, Windows Custom Information (WCI) uses script type information in the collection filter to
determine how to execute PowerShell and how to pass the script to it.
Use the following methods to pass a WCI script to PowerShell.
Configuring Windows Machines
VMware, Inc.
101