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System Center 2012 Configuration Manager and client machine restart notifications

September 1, 2012 Vinayak Sharma Leave a comment

Thanks to Terry McKinney (PFE – MS) for sharing this information.

For more details click here

Consider the following scenario:

You set System Center 2012 Configuration Manager (ConfigMgr) Client Agent\Computer Agent\Show notifications for new deployments to “False”.
You create a Software Updates Deployment in ConfigMgr.
The Software Updates Deployment contains software updates that require a machine restart in order to complete installation.
You configure the User Experience\User Notifications configuration setting for the deployment to “Hide in Software Center and all notifications”.
You configure the User Experience\Device Restart behavior configuration setting to “Suppress the system restart for both Servers and Workstations”.

Expected behavior:

No user notifications are displayed before, during, or after the software updates installation processes run..

Actual behavior:

Machine restart notifications are displayed on the ConfigMgr client machine after the post-install software updates scan completes. The notifications are displayed on all supported client operating system versions.

First visible indication:

A yellow “Restart Required” balloon notification is displayed.

If you click within the boundary of this yellow balloon notification, a Software Center “Restart your computer” notification is displayed. If you do not click within the boundary of the yellow notification box, the Software Center notification is not created and the yellow balloon notification fades away after approximately 5 seconds.

If you make no selections in the Software Center notification, it remains onscreen indefinitely. If you click Cancel or if you click Snooze and then click “OK”, the Software Center notification closes and a green icon is displayed to the far left of the visible notification area. If you mouse over the icon, a small “restart required” dialogue opens up.

To date, only one method has been identified that will disable all visible machine restart notifications. This method uses a combination of domain GPO Adm template settings and Local Policy Adm template settings with Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2. The specific Local Policy configuration settings are new with Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2. Thus these are the only client operating systems with which it is possible to achieve complete and total suppression of the restart notifications. These policies are:

NOTE Best practice discourages unnecessary editing of the Default Domain Policy.

Domain Policy
User Configuration
Policies
Admin templates
Start Menu and Taskbar
Set “Turn off all Balloon Notifications” to “Enabled”
Local policy on Win 7 (New setting for Windows 7):

Local Policy
User Configuration
Policies
Admin templates
Start Menu and Taskbar
Set “Turn off automatic promotion of notifications to the taskbar” to Enabled.

References:

Agent Configuration