On 11 January 2019 I had the privilege to speak at the Michigan System Center Users Group meeting on the topic of using Power BI to report your OSD build stats. This is a companion post to that presentation. This is an update to my original post ( here ) on how to gather and present […]| The Systems Monkey
I’ve been looking for a simple way to identify and map out the nested task sequences. This is the first part of a project that I’m working on. The goal of the overall project is to duplicate an entire task sequence “suite” of the parent and all nested sequences, and then update all the nested […]| The Systems Monkey
How to provide hard statistics on your build sequences. In Part 1 I went into how I collected the data that would be used to report on the 2 goals my boss set out for our OS deployment; 1) a 90% success rate and 2) 60 minute build times. Part 2: Reporting on the Results using Excel With the […]| The Systems Monkey
How to provide hard statistics on your build sequences. A while back my boss gave me two goals for our OS deployments; 1) he set a target for 90% successful builds and 2) build times as close to 1 hour as possible. Okay, getting there is one thing, but how do I report on that? […]| The Systems Monkey
Last week I wrote a post about setting up Windows PE Peer Caching. One of the limitations of that feature is that it only works within the Windows PE portion of a build task sequence. Once in the full OS or for deployments to established clients Peer Caching is unavailable. Phil Wilcock, co-founder of 2Pint […]| The Systems Monkey
What is Windows PE Peer Caching? Windows PE Peer Caching was a feature added in Configuration Manager Technical Preview 2. During an OS deployment, it allows a machine being built to pull content from other systems on the local subnet (its peers) as opposed to going across a potentially slow WAN connection. It is quite […]| The Systems Monkey
The Microsoft Intune Team has been busy at work releasing new features. One of those features that was released in the Service release 2301 was the ability to create filters based on the device’s Azure AD Join Type (aka deviceTrustType). This is really handy when there is the need to target devices based on this…| Mike's Tech Blog
August 25, 2022 Windows KB5012170 is turning out to be one of those patches that is causing a ton of headaches. The biggest one is for those user’s that got the lovely BitLocker Recovery screen but had no idea what their BitLocker recovery key is or where to find it. This happened to my father-in-law’s…| Mike's Tech Blog
If you are familiar with the work that Gary Blok and I have done on BIOS and Drivers, you will already know that we like to use extra fields on the Package properties to store meta date that we use for reporting and automation. Four of the fields that we like to use are on…| Mike's Tech Blog
The Microsoft Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset (aka DaRT) is a powerful toolset that is available to Software Assurance customers. Johan Arwidmark recently wrote a post called Back to Basics – Reset the Windows 10 Admin Password using DaRT that covers the steps for creating the recovery media. The DaRT Recovery Image Wizard will generate a…| Mike's Tech Blog
If you have been involved with any kind of Windows deployments or Windows Update deployments in the last five or so years, you probably heard of the concept of deployment rings. Microsoft has been pushing this concept ever since they have moved to an ‘as a Service’ model for Windows 10 and other Microsoft products…| Mike's Tech Blog