MDM & GP Tips Blog

Dec 2009
10

Office 2010: How are you going to deploy it?

The Office 2010 deployment story using Group Policy doesn’t get any better than Office 2007. You could argue it gets worse. There is no longer any possible way to deploy Office 2007 via Group Policy (outside of 3rd party tools like Specops Deploy.)

I found this plucky little document entitled “Deployment Options for Microsoft Office 2010” found here http://tinyurl.com/yfredq2.

In short, there’s a PDF, Visio and XPS document showing Microsoft’s sanctioned ways to deploy Office. Yes, Group Policy is on the list, but it’s the same way as Office 2007: Group Policy using Startup Scripts.

Just for fun, I tried deploying Office 2010 using Group Policy Software Installation. No dice. There’s a single error message in the event log with a non-obvious message about the failure.

Great.

So, here are the official steps (which will work for both Office 2007 and Office 2010). This is my suggested method for deploying, since the other options are spendy.. (click MORE) to read the answer.

Step 1: Create a config.xml File
We saw the Office 2007 version of this earlier. It’s the same idea in Office 2010. It’s used when clients initially install Office 2010. You can set the installation to be silent, for instance.
At last check the Config.xml file for Office 2010 was documented here… Shortened to http://tinyurl.com/ye4sorx.

Step 2: Create a Custom MSP File
Like Office 2007, the Office 2010 config.xml file in Step 1 can only take us so far. Again, to create more Office simply run setup.exe /admin, and-voila!-the Office 2010 customization tool.
At last check the Office Customization Tool (OCT) can be found here: Shortened to http://tinyurl.com/ybtkxen
Again, it produces .MSP files.

Step 3: Place your MSP in the “Updates” folder
At installation time, you can have clients embrace the customizations you set in Step 2. Simply put the MSP file in the “Updates” folder on the network installation point of Office.

Step 4: Use Startup Scripts to Deploy Office 2007 or Office 2010
Use this suggested start up script to kick off you Office 2007 or Office 2010 installation: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=94264
You can use the script to ensure that you’re selecting the proper config.xml file you created in Step 1.

Optional: Re-Patch Your Target Machines
You can always create a specific MSP file for a specific machine or two using the OCT. For instance, maybe you just want one or two machines to not have Microsoft Access 2010.
After creating the MSP file, use the information about msiexec /p I detailed in the section “Using MSIEXEC to Patch a Distribution Point” in my book.

Except you don’t update the distribution point. Instead, you patch the specific machines, individually.

You’ll likely need another startup script to figure this out if you want to target specific machines.

If you’ve found a creative way to work around these Office 2007 or Office 2010 issues, I want to hear about it. Be sure to e-mail me and let me know your best techniques for deploying a customized Office 2007 or Office 2010 installation using Group Policy.

Aug 2009
14

My First Days with Windows 7

Let's go right to the punchline: Overall; positive.

Okay, now let's get to what's great, what's not and what's just weird.

Actually, before we do that, let's start off with my new hardware. If you know me, you know I love to do demos. I do demos left and right in my training courses, at WinConnections and TechEd, and other sundry events.

And, of course, I need to use a laptop lug around and do that. My laptop of choice has always been Dell. I've been a Dell man, since, well, Dell Laptops had TRACKBALLS in them, and not touchpads.

Yes, _that_ long.

Now, for the first time ever I went Lenovo. Honestly, the new Dell E series just seemed too "humongo" for me. The whole package, including the power supply just looked too.. Bulky.

 

Yep, that was my "very technical reason" for not getting another Dell. I'm sure they're great inside, but their aesthetics (at least compared to my Dell D620) was not an improvement (to me, anyway.) So, I got a Lenovo T500. The name alone makes me feel like I'm perpetually the star in my own personal Terminator film. I bought it cheap from the "Lenovo outlet store." It has a T9600 Core2Duo processor on board, and I fitted it myself with (oh drool!) 8GB RAM and 500GB hard drive @ 7200RPM (killer!)

Then I waited to get my hot little hands on Windows 7. I was in the beta program, so I got a "free key" to use when the beta ended.

Last Thursday night, I installed Windows 7, 64-Bit edition on my new monster laptop.

Before that, I had previously went to Lenovo's website and downloaded ANYTHING associated with the T500 + Vista. That is to say, since all Vista drivers are "upward" compatbile to Windows 7, having them "at the ready" seemed to be a good idea. I put them on an external USB disk.

My first 24 hours wasn't great. I installed Windows 7. I took all the updates. Then I installed all the T500 / Vista drivers. I rebooted when necessary. Finally, when I installed the video driver software, Windows 7 just hung and hung and hung and hung at the "Please wait" page.

Arrrgh. And this was AFTER I had already activated Windows 7 (Stupid, Stupid, Moskowitz.)

Well, I knew I could boot to Safe Mode and hack and slash my way out of this. But the more I thought about it.. why was I installing drivers for something that was, well, working already?

So I didn't.

I re-formatted and re-installed Windows 7. In my experience, more manufacturer software equals slower and more unstable machine. Said another way, if I can "get away with" the drivers that are included as part of Windows 7, I should have a faster and more stable system overall ... instead of having to know exactly WHICH drivers and in WHAT ORDER I should be installing them.

So that's what I did. I loaded Windows 7, I took all of Windows' updates (it had several driver updates for my system.) There were two devices Windows didn't have "built in drivers" for, and I did, indeed, install those from the Lenovo website. And that was it. I was done.

That being said, it wasn't totally a bed of roses.

This T500 system has this newfangled idea of having TWO video chips instead of just one. Let's call these two chips the "Good one" and the "Awesome one." Honestly, I don't ever, ever need the "Awesome one." I don't play games, so I don't need "awesomeness." "Awesome graphics" don't make my demos any faster, and honestly, that's all I care about for this machine.

This newfangled idea of two chips sounds great, but for me it just wasn't working perfectly with my total re-install. Every time I closed the lid and re-opened it, it thought my laptop display was "Display 2." All the stuff I was working on just disappeared.

You could say: "Well, Moskowitz, if you installed the drivers from Lenovo, you wouldn't be having this problem." Except, remember .. when I did install the drivers, that's exactly when the machine went into "mega hang" mode.

So, I needed a Plan B.

To fix this, I adjusted the T500's bios to say "Kill the Awesome chip. Only let me use the Good chip." And magically, all my troubles went away.

I'm sure, really, really sure, this is because I didn't choose to install Lenovo's "mega video driver" or something for the secondary video driver chips.

But I'm okay with that. I honestly need my laptop to do EXACTLY two things: display on the panel when I want to, and display outward on the VGA port for projecting when I want to.

Nothing fancy. So, no "awesome chip settings with crazy drivers" for me, thank you very much.

So, how is my overall experience with Windows 7 compared to Windows Vista? Well, my biggest problem with Windows Vista was that it was slow. Yes, lots of people complained about it being slow, but I tried to take an empirical approach and learn WHY my experience with Vista was slow.

For me, personally, I learned the "slow culprit" was the "Windows Search" service. On my previous laptop, the D620, where I tried to run Vista, every time I ran Filemon / Procmon, I could see it. Spinning it's wheels, doing it's thing -- ALL THE TIME and slowing me down.

As for Windows 7, I'm sad to say, that my initial experience is the same in this particular regard. Windows 7 still appears to (at least with my files) churn and churn and churn.

Maybe I haven't given it a fair shake. It's true, I didn't let it "settle in for three days" before getting frustrated and turning it off. I do have 60GB of "data" for it to pour over. So, in fairness, I'm going away next weekend, and I'm planning on turning ON the search service BEFORE I LEAVE, and see what happens when I return.

But for now, I have uninstalled the Windows 7 search feature, and you also (oddly) seem to need
to DISABLE the search service to really kill it (according to my Procmon traces.)

Here's the payoff though: Man, is this lappy fast! Right now, I'm really happy with the speed. Applications pop. Demos snap. Everything is like a crisp clean spring morning. Between a new processor, new OS, the 64-bits, 8GB of RAM and a 7200 RPM HD, darn tootin' this thing better fly.

Here are some miscellaneous notes about my first 7 days, in no particular order:

  • I have a wacky wacky "Cannon" all-in-one printer, fax, scanner thing. And that driver was included in Windows 7. And, it even shows me the "ink levels" while printing; just like the driver I previously needed to download from Cannon then hand-install on XP. Neat.
  • I'm pretty "keyboard centric." So about 1000 times a day, I type the following key sequence when working on XP: Ctl-Esc, R, cmd, enter. In XP, this would open the Start menu, R would hit the Run command, and CMD would get me to a command prompt. Now on Win 7, the same sequence makes NOTHING happen, because (even though I've put RUN back on the Start menu) there's no keyboard shortcut for 'R'un. gRRRR.  PS: My lappy has a WIN key, so Win+R work, but my external keyboard doesn't, so I'm stuck.
  • I have ONE piece of hardware that, darn it, I cannot use, and man, I'm disappointed. It's a USB-connected phone system that's voice activated and hooks into Outlook. It just crashes every time it runs. Just flat out crashes. Can't really get to the bottom of this. If anyone else has this device, it's called ArialPhone, and I'd love to hear if it's working for anyone out there on Win 7 or even Vista. (PS: Even "XP compatibility mode" likely won't get me out of this one; unless I want to run a copy of Outlook *INSIDE* that fake XP machine, which I don't.)
  • I have two other Outlook plug-ins which worked great on XP, but won't do their magic on Windows 7. Oddly, two *OTHER* Outlook plug-ins are working swimmingly. So, I don't know where the problem is. Still hacking on this one.
  • The Beta for the App-V client 4.6 is out, and includes 64-bit support. Honestly, the thing seems ROCK SOLID to me, but my understanding is that it's planned to be Beta for a while before it goes gold. AppV Applications in cache seem to run WAY WAY faster than they did in AppV 4.5. It took me about an hour to convert all my existing 4.5 sequenced apps to 4.6.
  • My wife walked behind me to see what I was working on. And it was my Windows 7 desktop. She saw the huge, huge icons that Windows 7 defaults with and asked "Are you in safe mode?" I can totally see her confusion, as Windows 7, in my opinion, looks totally bizzare with those big honkin' icons. The fix? While on the desktop, hold down Control and use the scroll wheel of your mouse to adjust. Kooky.
  • Lots of people seem to be all "gaga" about the new taskbar. Honestly, I don't love the "mixed metaphor" of applications running and applications' icons all jumbled together. I've reset it act a little more like XP did, and I'm a little saner now.

But, all around, 95% of my applications are working. Everything that's "broken" seems to be revolved around Outlook in some way. Everything else is working great. So, I'm not sure if I can blame Windows or what here. Regardless, I'll get to the bottom of these and shake out my final bugs.

But in short, my first week -- pretty solid after getting thru the bumps. I do have that "last mile" to push through, and I'll keep you posted as things progress.

Aug 2009
13

My First 7 Days with Windows 7


Let's go right to the punchline: Overall; positive.

Okay, now let's get to what's great, what's not and what's just weird.

Actually, before we do that, let's start off with my new hardware. If you know me, you know I love to do demos. I do demos left and right in my training courses, at WinConnections and TechEd, and other sundry events.

And, of course, I need to use a laptop lug around and do that. My laptop of choice has always been Dell. I've been a Dell man, since, well, Dell Laptops had TRACKBALLS in them, and not touchpads.

Yes, _that_ long.

Now, for the first time ever I went Lenovo. Honestly, the new Dell E series just seemed too "humongo" for me. The whole package, including the power supply just looked too.. Bulky.

Yep, that was my "very technical reason" for not getting another Dell. I'm sure they're great inside, but their asthetics (at least compared to my Dell D620) was not an improvement (to me, anyway.) So, I got a Lenovo T500. The name alone makes me feel like I'm perpetually the star in my own personal Terminator film.  I bought it cheap from the "Lenovo outlet store." It has a T9600 Core2Duo processor on board, and I fitted it myself with (oh drool!) 8GB RAM and 500GB hard  drive @ 7200RPM (killer!)

Then I waited to get my hot little hands on Windows 7. I was in the beta program, so I got a "free key" to use when the beta ended.

Last Thursday night, I installed Windows 7, 64-Bit edition on my new monster laptop.

Before that, I had previously went to Lenovo's website and downloaded ANYTHING associated with the T500 + Vista. That is to say, since all Vista drivers are "upward" compatbile to Windows 7, having them "at the ready" seemed to be a good idea. I put them on an external USB disk.

My first 24 hours wasn't great. I installed Windows 7. I took all the updates. Then I installed all the T500 / Vista drivers. I rebooted when necessary. Finally, when I installed the video driver software, Windows 7 just hung and hung and hung and hung at the "Please wait" page.

Arrrgh. And this was AFTER I had already activated Windows 7 (Stupid, Stupid, Moskowitz.)

Well, I knew I could boot to Safe Mode and hack and slash my way out of this. But the more I thought about it.. why was I installing drivers for something that was, well, working already?

So I didn't.

I re-formatted and re-installed Windows 7. In my experience, more manufacturer software equals slower and more unstable machine. Said another way, if I can "get away with" the drivers that are included as part of Windows 7, I should have a faster and more stable system overall ... instead of having to know exactly WHICH drivers and in WHAT ORDER I should be installing them.

So that's what I did. I loaded Windows 7, I took all of Windows' updates (it had several driver updates for my system.) There were two devices Windows didn't have "built in drivers" for, and I did, indeed, install those from the Lenovo website.  And that was it. I was done.

That being said, it wasn't totally a bed of roses.

This T500 system has this newfangled idea of having TWO video chips instead of just one. Let's call these two chips the "Good one" and the  "Awesome one." Honestly, I don't ever, ever need the "Awesome one." I don't play games, so I don't need "awesomeness." "Awesome graphics" don't make my demos any faster, and honestly, that's all I care about for this machine.

This newfangled idea of two chips sounds great, but for me it just wasn't working perfectly with my total re-install. Every time I closed the lid and re-opened it, it thought my laptop display was "Display 2." All the stuff I was working on just disappeared.

You could say: "Well, Moskowitz, if you installed the drivers from Lenovo, you wouldn't be having this problem." Except, remember .. when I did install the drivers, that's exactly when the machine went into "mega hang" mode.

So, I needed a Plan B.

To fix this, I adjusted the T500's bios to say "Kill the Awesome chip. Only let me use the Good  chip." And magically, all my troubles went away.

I'm sure, really, really sure, this is because I didn't choose to install Lenovo's "mega driver" or something for the secondary video driver chips.

But I'm okay with that. I honestly need my laptop to do EXACTLY two things: display on the panel when I want to, and display outward on the VGA port for projecting when I want to.

Nothing fancy. So, no "awesome chip settings with crazy drivers" for me, thank you very much.

So, how is my overall experience with Windows 7 compared to Windows Vista? Well, my biggest problem with Windows Vista was that it was slow. Yes, lots of people complained about it being slow, but I tried to take an empirical approach and learn WHY my experience with Vista was slow.

For me, personally, I learned the "slow culprit" was the "Windows Search" service. On my previous laptop, the D620, where I tried to run Vista, every time I ran Filemon / Procmon, I could see it. Spinning it's wheels, doing it's thing -- ALL THE TIME and slowing me down.

As for Windows 7, I'm sad to say, that my initial experience is the same in this particular regard. Windows 7 still appears to (at least with my files) churn and churn and churn.

Maybe I haven't given it a fair shake. It's true, I didn't let it "settle in for three days" before getting frustrated and turning it off. I do have 60GB of "data" for it to pour over. So, in fairness, I'm going away for the next weekend, and I'm planning on turning ON the search service BEFORE I LEAVE, and see what happens when I return.

But for now, I have uninstalled the Windows 7 search feature, and you also (oddly) seem to need
to DISABLE the search service to really kill it (according to my Procmon traces.)

Here's the payoff though: Man, is this lappy fast! Right now, I'm really happy with the speed. Applications pop. Demos snap. Everything is like a crisp clean spring morning. Between a new processor, new OS, the 64-bits, 8GB of RAM and a 7200 RPM HD, darn tootin' this thing better fly.

Here are some miscellaneous notes about my first 7 days, in no particular order:

- I have a wacky wacky "Cannon" all-in-one printer, fax, scanner thing. And that driver was included in Windows 7. And, it even shows me the "ink levels" while printing; just like the driver I previously needed to download from Cannon then hand-install on XP. Neat.

- I'm pretty "keyboard centric." So about 1000 times a day, I type the following key sequence when working on XP: Ctl-Esc, R, cmd, enter. In XP, this would open the Start menu, R would hit the Run command, and CMD would get me to a command prompt. Now on Win 7, the same sequence makes NOTHING happen, because (even though I've put RUN back on the Start menu) there's no keyboard shortcut for 'R'un. gRRRR.

- I have ONE piece of hardware that, darn it, I cannot use, and man, I'm disappointed. It's a phone system that's voice activated and hooks into Outlook. It just crashes every time it runs. Can't really get to the bottom of this. If anyone else has this device, it's called ArialPhone, and I'd love to hear if it's working for anyone out there on Win 7 or even Vista.

- I have two other Outlook plug-ins which worked great on XP, but won't do their magic on Windows 7. Oddly, two *OTHER* Outlook plug-ins are working swimmingly. So, I don't know where the problem is. Still hacking on this one.

- The Beta for the App-V client 4.6 is out, and includes 64-bit support. Honestly, the thing seems ROCK SOLID to me, but my understanding is that it's planned to be Beta for a while before it goes gold. AppV Applications in cache seem to run WAY WAY faster than they did in AppV 4.5. It took me about an hour to convert all my existing 4.5 sequenced apps to 4.6.

- My wife walked behind me to see what I was working on. And it was my Windows 7 desktop. She saw the huge, huge icons that Windows 7 defaults with and asked "Are you in safe mode?" I can totally see her confusion, as Windows 7, in my opinion, looks totally bizzare with those big honkin' icons. The fix? While on the desktop, hold down Control and use the scroll wheel of your mouse to adjust. Kooky.

- Lots of people seem to be all "gaga" about the new taskbar. Honestly, I don't love the "mixed metaphor" of applications running and applications' icons all jumbled together. I've reset it act a little more like XP did, and I'm a little saner now.

But, all around, 95% of my applications are working. Everything that's "broken" seems to be revolved around Outlook in some way. Everything else is working great. So, I'm not sure if I can blame Windows or what here. Regardless, I'll get to the bottom of these and shake out my final bugs.

But in short, my first week -- pretty solid after getting thru the bumps.



Aug 2009
13

First Look at Windows 7

Part 1: My First 7 days with Windows 7
------------------------------------------------------

Let's go right to the punchline: Overall; positive.

Okay, now let's get to what's great, what's not and what's just weird.

Actually, before we do that, let's start off with my new hardware. If you know me, you know I love to do demos. I do demos left and right in my training courses, at WinConnections and TechEd, and other sundry events.

And, of course, I need to use a laptop lug around and do that. My laptop of choice has always been Dell. I've been a Dell man, since, well, Dell Laptops had TRACKBALLS in them, and not touchpads.

Yes, _that_ long.

Now, for the first time ever I went Lenovo. Honestly, the new Dell E series just seemed too "humongo" for me. The whole package, including the power supply just looked too.. Bulky.

Yep, that was my "very technical reason" for not getting another Dell. I'm sure they're great inside, but their aesthetics (at least compared to my Dell D620) was not an improvement (to me, anyway.) So, I got a Lenovo T500. The name alone makes me feel like I'm perpetually the star in my own personal Terminator film. I bought it cheap from the "Lenovo outlet store." It has a T9600 Core2Duo processor on board, and I fitted it myself with (oh drool!) 8GB RAM and 500GB hard drive @ 7200RPM (killer!)

Then I waited to get my hot little hands on Windows 7. I was in the beta program, so I got a "free key" to use when the beta ended.

Last Thursday night, I installed Windows 7, 64-Bit edition on my new monster laptop.

Before that, I had previously went to Lenovo's website and downloaded ANYTHING associated with the T500 + Vista. That is to say, since all Vista drivers are "upward" compatbile to Windows 7, having them "at the ready" seemed to be a good idea. I put them on an external USB disk.

My first 24 hours wasn't great. I installed Windows 7. I took all the updates. Then I installed all the T500 / Vista drivers. I rebooted when necessary. Finally, when I installed the video driver software, Windows 7 just hung and hung and hung and hung at the "Please wait" page.

Arrrgh. And this was AFTER I had already activated Windows 7 (Stupid, Stupid, Moskowitz.)

Well, I knew I could boot to Safe Mode and hack and slash my way out of this. But the more I thought about it.. why was I installing drivers for something that was, well, working already?

So I didn't.

I re-formatted and re-installed Windows 7. In my experience, more manufacturer software equals slower and more unstable machine. Said another way, if I can "get away with" the drivers that are included as part of Windows 7, I should have a faster and more stable system overall ... instead of having to know exactly WHICH drivers and in WHAT ORDER I should be installing them.

So that's what I did. I loaded Windows 7, I took all of Windows' updates (it had several driver updates for my system.) There were two devices Windows didn't have "built in drivers" for, and I did, indeed, install those from the Lenovo website. And that was it. I was done.

That being said, it wasn't totally a bed of roses.

This T500 system has this newfangled idea of having TWO video chips instead of just one. Let's call these two chips the "Good one" and the "Awesome one." Honestly, I don't ever, ever need the "Awesome one." I don't play games, so I don't need "awesomeness." "Awesome graphics" don't make my demos any faster, and honestly, that's all I care about for this machine.

This newfangled idea of two chips sounds great, but for me it just wasn't working perfectly with my total re-install. Every time I closed the lid and re-opened it, it thought my laptop display was "Display 2." All the stuff I was working on just disappeared.

You could say: "Well, Moskowitz, if you installed the drivers from Lenovo, you wouldn't be having this problem." Except, remember .. when I did install the drivers, that's exactly when the machine went into "mega hang" mode.

So, I needed a Plan B.

To fix this, I adjusted the T500's bios to say "Kill the Awesome chip. Only let me use the Good chip." And magically, all my troubles went away.

I'm sure, really, really sure, this is because I didn't choose to install Lenovo's "mega video driver" or something for the secondary video driver chips.

But I'm okay with that. I honestly need my laptop to do EXACTLY two things: display on the panel when I want to, and display outward on the VGA port for projecting when I want to.

Nothing fancy. So, no "awesome chip settings with crazy drivers" for me, thank you very much.

So, how is my overall experience with Windows 7 compared to Windows Vista? Well, my biggest problem with Windows Vista was that it was slow. Yes, lots of people complained about it being slow, but I tried to take an empirical approach and learn WHY my experience with Vista was slow.

For me, personally, I learned the "slow culprit" was the "Windows Search" service. On my previous laptop, the D620, where I tried to run Vista, every time I ran Filemon / Procmon, I could see it. Spinning it's wheels, doing it's thing -- ALL THE TIME and slowing me down.

As for Windows 7, I'm sad to say, that my initial experience is the same in this particular regard. Windows 7 still appears to (at least with my files) churn and churn and churn.

Maybe I haven't given it a fair shake. It's true, I didn't let it "settle in for three days" before getting frustrated and turning it off. I do have 60GB of "data" for it to pour over. So, in fairness, I'm going away next weekend, and I'm planning on turning ON the search service BEFORE I LEAVE, and see what happens when I return.

But for now, I have uninstalled the Windows 7 search feature, and you also (oddly) seem to need
to DISABLE the search service to really kill it (according to my Procmon traces.)

Here's the payoff though: Man, is this lappy fast! Right now, I'm really happy with the speed. Applications pop. Demos snap. Everything is like a crisp clean spring morning. Between a new processor, new OS, the 64-bits, 8GB of RAM and a 7200 RPM HD, darn tootin' this thing better fly.

Here are some miscellaneous notes about my first 7 days, in no particular order:

- I have a wacky wacky "Cannon" all-in-one printer, fax, scanner thing. And that driver was included in Windows 7. And, it even shows me the "ink levels" while printing; just like the driver I previously needed to download from Cannon then hand-install on XP. Neat.

- I'm pretty "keyboard centric." So about 1000 times a day, I type the following key sequence when working on XP: Ctl-Esc, R, cmd, enter. In XP, this would open the Start menu, R would hit the Run command, and CMD would get me to a command prompt. Now on Win 7, the same sequence makes NOTHING happen, because (even though I've put RUN back on the Start menu) there's no keyboard shortcut for 'R'un. gRRRR.

- I have ONE piece of hardware that, darn it, I cannot use, and man, I'm disappointed. It's a USB-connected phone system that's voice activated and hooks into Outlook. It just crashes every time it runs. Just flat out crashes. Can't really get to the bottom of this. If anyone else has this device, it's called ArialPhone, and I'd love to hear if it's working for anyone out there on Win 7 or even Vista. (PS: Even "XP compatibility mode" likely won't get me out of this one; unless I want to run a copy of Outlook *INSIDE* that fake XP machine, which I don't.)

- I have two other Outlook plug-ins which worked great on XP, but won't do their magic on Windows 7. Oddly, two *OTHER* Outlook plug-ins are working swimmingly. So, I don't know where the problem is. Still hacking on this one.

- The Beta for the App-V client 4.6 is out, and includes 64-bit support. Honestly, the thing seems ROCK SOLID to me, but my understanding is that it's planned to be Beta for a while before it goes gold. AppV Applications in cache seem to run WAY WAY faster than they did in AppV 4.5. It took me about an hour to convert all my existing 4.5 sequenced apps to 4.6.

- My wife walked behind me to see what I was working on. And it was my Windows 7 desktop. She saw the huge, huge icons that Windows 7 defaults with and asked "Are you in safe mode?" I can totally see her confusion, as Windows 7, in my opinion, looks totally bizzare with those big honkin' icons. The fix? While on the desktop, hold down Control and use the scroll wheel of your mouse to adjust. Kooky.

- Lots of people seem to be all "gaga" about the new taskbar. Honestly, I don't love the "mixed metaphor" of applications running and applications' icons all jumbled together. I've reset it act a little more like XP did, and I'm a little saner now.

But, all around, 95% of my applications are working. Everything that's "broken" seems to be revolved around Outlook in some way. Everything else is working great. So, I'm not sure if I can blame Windows or what here. Regardless, I'll get to the bottom of these and shake out my final bugs.

But in short, my first week -- pretty solid after getting thru the bumps. I do have that "last mile" to push through, and I'll keep you posted as things progress.

 

 

Jul 2009
16

Backing up (even quicker)

Quick update #1: About the "backing up GPOs" stuff we talked about this week...
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I forgot all about Darren Mar-Elia's PowerShell cmd-lets (free!)

If you don't want to wait for Win 7 but want to use Powershell to manage GPOs now, head on over to http://www.sdmsoftware.com/freeware and get their free Powershell GPMC cmdlets.

To backup up all GPOs in a domain using the SDM Powershell cmdlets, just use:

Get-sdmgpo * | export-sdmgpo -location c:gpbackups

Neat !



Jul 2009
13

Automating your backups....

Team:

Last week, we talked about backing up your GPOs, and how you should be, ya know, "just doing it."

Then I got some emails asking me about "automating that backup."

Turns out.. that's easy too! Here's two ways (I'm sure there are more.)

Way #1: VB-scripts via the GPMC scripts
The older GPMC had built-in scripts. The newer GPMCs require that you download the sample scripts. These are great and super helpful and can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/gpscripts

You can see examples of using the scripts if you head over here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa814151(VS.85).aspx

The script you want to play with is called "BackupAllGPOs.vbs."

It's easy as pie. Or punch. Or something that's easy.

Way #2: If you're a Powershell geek / geekette
The newest GPMC with Win7 and WS08/R2 supports lots of SIMILAR constructs (create GPOs, backup, restore, etc), but now you can ALSO use PowerShell. So, to "get" the GP-related commands into Powershell, I typed

"Import-Module grouppolicy -verbose"

then I was able to run this quick command

"backup-gpo -all -path c:SavedGPOs"

And, blammo. Instant backup of my GP-world.

There's more to the command, of course; but that's its simplest use.

Again, easy as falling off a log... if you know the secrets.



Aug 2008
05

More freeness awesomeness -- WinInstall LE

Remember the good ol' days? When right on the Windows CD-ROM was a great little free MSI repackaging tool called WinInstall LE?

Well, then it just went away.

A lot happened since then. WinInstall broke free, and became their own company. Then they were bought out by Attachmate. Then finally sold to Scalable software.

And look what happened? It's free again! So, if you're looking for a great little MSI repackaging tool (totally free) check it out here.

Oh yeah, and they mention me in the press quote. Because, you know I like free stuff!