This one has been a long time coming. I have been hand-building menus for the Configuration Manager console for years, and I finally got tired enough of it to do something about it.
If you have ever added a custom action to the console, you know exactly the routine I mean. Go and find the right GUID folder buried under XmlStorage\Extensions\Actions. Open an XML file in Notepad++. Copy an existing block, change the name, change the command line, and take a wild guess at the icon. Save it. Restart the console. Discover you fat-fingered something. Restart the console again. Repeat until either the menu is right or you decide you did not want that menu item after all.
That workflow is fine once. It is annoying the fifth time. By about the fiftieth time it is genuinely soul-destroying, and I passed the fiftieth time a long while ago.
So here is Console Menu Editor.
What it does
Console Menu Editor (CME) reads the action XML files in a menu folder and shows it the way your brain already thinks about it: in a tree format on the left, and the details of whatever you clicked on the right. You edit the fields, press Save. That is the whole idea.
Along the way it picks up all the things I kept wishing for while I was doing this by hand:
- Displays the icons. Not a placeholder and not a guess and shows it beside the node, so you can see immediately when you have attached the wrong one.
- Reordering a menu is two clicks instead of a cut-and-paste job in a text editor.
- Add and delete actions for both items and folders, with a confirmation that says plainly when deleting a folder is about to take everything inside it along with it.
- A backup before every single change plus a restore screen, so restoring a previous version does not mean hunting through folders.
- I love my logs, and this tool delivers with a great CMTrace-style log of everything it does.
- Clone and rename for both items and folders.
- The first feedback I got was, “How can I deploy this to others?” That is how the export and import feature came to be: Package up a menu and deploy the identical one to every console in your environment.
It edits any menu, but it starts with the one you use most
Each folder represents a different menu in the ConfigMgr console. By default, the tool opens the device menu. CME can edit any menu in the ConfigMgr console. Each folder contains XML files, which is the menus themselves.
Out of the box, though, it points at one specific menu: the single device menu. That is the one you get when you right-click a single device inside any collection. I chose it deliberately, because if you are anything like me, it is the menu you touch a hundred times a day. Also, it is the one where a little tidying pays for itself immediately.
Which brings me to the first thing I did with it.
Build yourself a Favorites folder
The very first thing I built for myself was a Favorites folder (purple arrow above), holding the handful of Right Click Tools I run all day plus a few custom scripts of my own. No more hunting through submenus for the same six things. They are simply there at the top, where my mouse already is.
It took about four minutes to set up. It has saved me hours since. If you try nothing else with this tool, try that.
A word about that Tool IDs button
You will spot a Tool IDs button in the ribbon that lists every tool identifier across all of your menus. If you are wondering why on earth you would want such a thing, do not worry about it too much just yet. It is groundwork for an idea I have been kicking around, and I needed to see all of those IDs in one place before I could take it any further. Consider it a hint.
Tell me what you think
I want to hear from you on this one, and there are two different things I am after.
If you have a suggestion, something the tool ought to do that it does not do yet, put it on the Ideas Portal. These ideas are public, so other people can pile on and vote for yours, and that is genuinely how things get prioritized. If you have feedback, whether the tool broke, the workflow feels clumsy, you love it, or you hate it, tell us on Reddit. Or grab me in person. I go to a fair number of conferences throughout the year, and I am always happy to be shown what I got wrong. Bring your laptop and show me.
And one open question I would really like help with: How should this work for the Right Click Tools Browser Extension? The console and the browser extension are different beasts, and I have my own opinions. But I would much rather hear yours before “I” go and build anything. Tell me what you would expect it to do.
Go and vote on these while you are there
There are already ideas on the portal that are close cousins of this tool. If they matter to you, go and vote, and leave a comment while you are at it. Comments help more than votes, because they tell us why.
- https://ideas.recastsoftware.com/ideas/RCT-I-94 – Let administrators customize the Right Click Tools Browser Extension menu by hiding, disabling, and reordering entries, so people only see what is relevant to their role.
- https://ideas.recastsoftware.com/ideas/RCT-I-61 – If you manage devices exclusively with Intune, allow the ConfigMgr menu items to be hidden so the menu stays focused on the tools you can actually use.
- https://ideas.recastsoftware.com/ideas/RS-I-752 – Pin your own items to the top of the menu, in the way you add your favorite buttons to the Outlook ribbon.
You will notice that last one is very much the same itch this tool scratches. That is not a coincidence.
Get it, then show me on social
Grab it, point it at your console, and build the menu you have always wanted instead of the one you inherited.
Then do me a favor. Take a screenshot of your new Favorites folder and post it on social media, tagging Recast Software and myself. I want to see what everybody puts in their menus. I have a suspicion that no two Favorites folders in the wild will look the same, and I would love to be proven right.
