In my Lab(s), I have hundreds of VMs spread across multiple Hyper-V hosts (and a few VMware hosts too, but that's out of scope for this post). The operating systems used for my Hyper-V hosts are a mix of Windows Server 2016, 2019, and 2022. Also, I have Data DeDuplication enabled on all volumes used […]

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Earlier this week I was asked to help out with an MDT Lite Touch Driver Repository that was missing most of its drivers. After some research it turned out that the drivers.xml had been truncated, something that can happen if multiple admin are working with drivers at the same time (MDT uses a last-writer-wins approach). […]

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Having total control for drivers and firmware, mean that you are following a per model method when deploying or updating drivers. The total control method has been proven rock-solid for on-premises deployment solutions, and with the newly released commercial controls for driver and firmware updates in the WUfB deployment service it is time to take […]

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Configuration Baselines in ConfigMgr is an excellent way to update application configurations the way you want them to be. In this example, I was asked by one of our online academy students to update a Cisco AnyConnect local policy with a new value for its <FipsMode> setting. Sounded like a great blog topic to me […]

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Johan has maintained his Hydration Kits to help us quickly and easily deploy a ConfigMgr lab for many years now and I’m excited to help take these amazing kits even further by adding some additional customizations and enhancements to test more scenarios, speed up deployment, and customize the kits more easily. Last year we added […]

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Here is a quick guide to create a Win32 app in Intune to copy som files and folders to your clients. In the example I had some tools I wanted to copy to all my lab machines and use Microsoft Intune to do so. Source Folder In this example I copied my files and folders […]

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On November 28 (yesterday), the new Firmware Assessments feature in Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management was announced as being available in Public Preview. Read more about the announcement here: Firmware assessments in Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management Licensing The license requirements are too often clear as mud, but it seems to work just fine with a regular […]

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If you ever have the need to force/trigger a full sync of the WSUS Metadata in ConfigMgr, for example for troubleshooting, or simple demo purposes. This is how. Forcing WSUS Metadata sync PowerShell to the rescue 🙂 Simply run this command after importing the Configuration Manager PowerShell module: The above command really just creates an […]

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I recently bought a machine capable of running Windows 11 on Arm, The Windows Dev Kit 2023 aka Project Volterra. Now, since neither MDT nor ConfigMgr support Windows deployment on Arm devices, in this post you find a quick and dirty solution that takes us back to the Jurassic era, before OSD was cool 🙂 To […]

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Last week I was participating in a thread on Twitter regarding a request for Microsoft to generate monthly updated media (ISO files) for all supported Windows versions. Something that Microsoft certainly can do, and probably do internally, but for whatever reason have decided to only publish for the very latest versions of Windows. Because of […]

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Every now and then when using MDT Lite Touch to deploy Windows you may run into a yellow summary screen (warning screen) with the following warning message: Unable to create WebService class Background In the preceding example there were some other warnings as well, but you often find the Unable to create WebService class message […]

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Unless you have been totally off grid the last few days you probably noticed a ton of new information on Endpoint Management from Microsoft, more specifically from the Microsoft Technical Takeoff event that has been running this week. The Microsoft Technical Takeoff event was combination of about live AMA (Ask Microsoft Anything) sessions and pre-recorded […]

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In this post you find guidance on using a script to add the local computer to an Active Directory group during deployment. This script has basic logging built-in, supports multiple domains, and is available on GitHub. Note #1: While I typically would use a web service for any AD operations – either managed code, or […]

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This is a short post where the built in appx and FOD (feature on demand) packages are compared to the ones in the original Windows 11 21H2 release. The Enterprise version of Windows 11 have been used to make the comparison. The built in appx packages and FODs are documented by Microsoft here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/application-management/provisioned-apps-windows-client-osandhttps://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/application-management/system-apps-windows-client-os At […]

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For those of you following me on social media, you know that I for the past two months or so have been researching how Intune could be used to deploy large applications. While this post covers how to decrease the time it takes to upload the applications, you can read the initial post below: Deploying […]

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In late July, I was asked to do a Proof-Of-Concept (POC) for one of our customers regarding Intune and deployment of large applications. Basically, they wanted to know how well Intune would work with application sizes in the 5 – 20 GB range. Obviously, this story is not going to end well, but please read […]

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While doing some Intune automation the other day I got stuck on trying to assign a script to a group.Using the graph API documentation sent me on a wild goose chase so just wanted to write a small writeup if someone else ran into the same problem. This post will only focus on how to […]

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Just a quick post to announce that we have a released a free Ebook on Windows 11 deployment using ConfigMgr or MDT Lite Touch. 75 pages with step-by-step guides for Windows 11 imaging. To secure your copy, simply sign up for our newsletter on the Deployment News link in the banner above. eBook Outline: The […]

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Ever having troubles about WinPE not finding your disk drive during deployment? Even though you added the correct drivers to it. Well, it can be as simple as your driver were added to the boot image in the wrong order. Did I get your attention? Well, there is more. 🙂 Some Hardware Vendors are Better […]

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Here are my favorite topics, questions, and answers from the Microsoft AMA (Ask Me Anything) Windows Autopilot session on July 21, 2022. The recording from this live presentation as well as earlier AMA sessions is available on the main Windows IT Pro YouTube channel, and here is a direct link to the AMA Autopilot session: […]

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