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The complete idiots guide to Windows as a Service

By Johan Arwidmark / May 6, 2017

For what feels like the tenth time, Microsoft is changing their terminology/strategy around Windows 10 updates. Below is a recent thread covering the topic (thanks to Ami Casto (@AdaptivaAmi) and SystemCenterDudes (@scdudes) for making me aware of the changes):

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Fixing why Sysprep fails in Windows 10 or Windows 11 due to Windows Store updates

By Johan Arwidmark / April 13, 2017

When creating reference images for Windows 10 or Windows 11, Sysprep is very likely to fail if the machine has Internet access, and have enough time to start updating it's built-in applications, or install new ones as part of the consumer experience feature. This post is about preventing that from happening, and is a companion to my guides on building Windows 10 and Windows 11 reference images.

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Managing Windows PCs using Microsoft Intune – With or without the Intune Client Software

By Johan Arwidmark / March 20, 2017

A little while back I had to do a presentation about what options that are available from Microsoft to manage Windows PCs, and to summarize, there are only two (sort of): ConfigMgr or Intune (standalone), or combining ConfigMgr and Intune (the hybrid model). Anyway, when preparing the presentation I spent some time on testing the standalone Microsoft Intune solution, and quickly run into a question: Should you, or should you not, use the Intune client software ?

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Windows 10 Configurations – PowerShell and WMI Bridge vs. Provisioning Packages

By Johan Arwidmark / March 11, 2017

In Windows 10 you have the option of creating provisioning packages to apply settings/configurations to a machine. For example upgrading a machine running Windows 10 Professional to Windows 10 Enterprise. Now, to apply a provisioning package, you can either do it automatically in WinPE via DISM.exe, or later in the running Windows operating system by double-clicking the provisioning package and walk through a quick wizard.

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Setup BranchCache for ConfigMgr Current Branch

By Johan Arwidmark / March 5, 2017

Windows 10 updates, both the scheduled updates from Microsoft as well as updates of Windows 10 apps, can put a significant load on your network. At least if you compare it with what a Windows 7 client does. Add that to all you normal deployments, images, applications etc. and you’ll find yourself running down the hallway, chased by folks from the network group 🙂

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Customizing the ViaMonstra Hydration Kit

By Ami Casto / February 16, 2017

Back in December, the ViaMonstra hydration kit was updated to support Server (and SQL) 2016.  You can follow the post here to set it up.  We get a lot of questions offline about customizing the kit, so here is a summary of customization.

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Extend the ConfigMgr Task Sequence Error Dialogue Timeout

By Ami Casto / February 12, 2017

Default behavior for failed deployments in ConfigMgr is for the error box to stick around for 15 minutes before rebooting.  That’s plenty of time if you have nothing better to do than watch progress bars and wait for failures.  But what if you have work to do and you need the error to stick around a bit longer?

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Setup Peer Cache in ConfigMgr Current Branch

By Johan Arwidmark / February 9, 2017

In ConfigMgr Current Branch v1610 Microsoft added in a new feature called Peer Cache. It had previously had a few guest appearances in the Technical Preview branch, but now finally made it to the shinier branch, e.g. Current Branch. Anyway, this feature is designed to help reduce the network impact of delivering content to clients in distributed environments, and works with the package types that ConfigMgr supports (updates, legacy packages, applications, images etc.).

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