If you haven’t seen the parent post for this article, jump back here to see a complete list of all new features in Configuration Manager 1902.

This post covers the specific additions and improvements to content management that were added to Configuration Manager 1902.

Distribution Point maintenance mode

I can lay claim to having played an extremely small part in this feature – completely by accident due to an ill-timed phone call. Feel free to ask me more if you see me out and about. This feature was a hackathon topic during the November 2018 MVP mini-summit and fellow MVPs Robert Marshall and Zeng Yinghua (AKA Sandy) were firmly flying the flag for this feature which was owned by Bippin from the product group. The basic premise of this feature is to ‘pause’ it whilst you do some maintenance to the distribution point server. More specifically, when the DP is in maintenance mode:

• It won’t receive new content
• Management points won’t point clients to it
• You can’t change the properties of it

Worth noting however that:

• If you perform a site update, the DP will still be updated
• Regular scheduled tasks such as content validation will still run.

Again, a really nice addition to the product which will ultimately provide a better end user experience (by not failing their installs) and a better admin experience by catering for maintenance.

To enable maintenance mode…

We also have two more columns we can add into view along with an icon change. Also, the last start time may take a minute or so to appear, worth noting.

And to disable maintenance mode again…