Have you ever looked at something and just wondered “What were they thinking”? This is the thought I have every time I log into a newly built Windows 11 Enterprise device and see the Teams for home and Chat apps loaded. Anyone else feel like the dude in the glasses is mocking you as you fail to log in with your work account over and over?? So glad we can Chat and collaborate in one app!| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
The Key to Success is Knowledge Recently Garth Jones accused me of knowing something that I knew nothing about and I was very offended by that. So much so, that when Bryan Dam came to me demanding to know the keys to BitLocker keys in ConfigMgr, I decided I should figure it out. So I did. Here’s what I know now: Keying in on the Issue When trying to automate processes around ConfigMgr, there are Ways to do things then there are Supported Ways to do things.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
The following examples were compiled from the CMPivot Home screen examples and the PowerShell equivalent commands were extracted from the CMPivot PowerShell script that is copied down locally to C:\Windows\CCM\ScriptStore. The goal is the provide a way to understand what each command is actually doing when you run it. Interpreting this Reference Query Type WMI - The command run locally on the client is querying WMI. Any entity not listed here but available in CMPivot uses the same WMI Class t...| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
Before we begin, here are some notes about persistent and non-persistent VDI that will likely give you nightmares: Intune doesn’t support non-persistent VDI Azure Active Directory only supports Hybrid Azure AD Join for non-persistent VDI ConfigMgr recommends limiting client functionality on non-persistent VDI but there is no mention about the impact of Co-Management on these devices. Whatever you do, don’t Hybrid Join then Co-Manage your VDI Master Image or you’re in for a bad time!| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
I work part time as a consultant with System Center Dudes. If you’d like to request my assistance with consulting work, please contact them directly at System Center Dudes. Tell them that Adam sent you :-).| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
If you need to contact me, please send me a DM on Twitter or shoot me an Email.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
Recently one of our sites began having some issues with domain joined devices losing their trust relationship with Active Directory. While some users were able to log in with cached credentials, we had no easy way to get admin credentials to repair the domain trust. I’m going to show how Configmgr Run Scripts and Microsoft Quick Assist helped us get admin access to the devices to perform troubleshooting and remediation. The purpose of this post is to show how we can leverage various tools t...| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
Today my co-worker was attempting to delete an old application and got blocked with the following message message and I wanted to document it for future reference. Configuration Manager cannot delete this application because other applications or task sequences reference it or it is configured as a deployment. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Configuration Manager cannot delete this application because other applications or task sequences reference it or it is configured as a deployment.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
We got some new hardware models in this week and added drivers to our ConfigMgr OSD Task Sequence (with Windows 10 1909 serviced with November 2020 updates) to test. One of the devices kept ending up with a broken domain trust relationship when you attempt to log in immediately following build completion. The security database on the server does not have a computer account for this workstation trust relationship One clue that we had was that something was renaming the device.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
I wrote a new post over on SysManSquad.com. Check it out. ConfigMgr and The Case of the Mysterious {3DA228BE-34DA-49f4-A081-66465B077429} Folder - Systems Management Squad (sysmansquad.com)| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
Over the past few weeks I’ve been testing re-writing my Windows 10 Feature Update repo to make it easier to implement - if you haven’t tried it, go check it out. Just follow the readme in the repo https://github.com/AdamGrossTX/Windows10FeatureUpdates. During the re-write I was reminded that there were a few command line parameters that I hadn’t experimented with. One of them is /MigNEO which only has a Disable option. According to the product group, NEO stands for non-event objective w...| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
As soon as I read the release notes for ConfigMgr 2008 Technical Preview I knew I would be doing some digging. This release introduced the first iteration of a feature that will hopefully help make Windows 10 Feature Update servicing a little easier to manage. Listed as Analyze SetupDiag errors for feature updates this feature has been added to the Windows 10 Servicing dashboard. When I initially read the release notes and looked at the included graph, I was disappointed.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
Today I got to help my buddy Adam Juelich with getting ConfigMgr Azure Directory Group Sync working. It’s an awesome new feature that allows you to sync ConfigMgr collection memberships to your Azure tenant. Adam had followed all of the steps and ensured that prerequisites were all configured properly but sync would never work. Over a Teams meeting we double checked everything and walked through Ronny Dejong’s (He covers pretty much all of troubleshooting steps needed for this!| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
If you’ve been managing Windows 10 for very long, you’ve likely implemented a script or other method to remove some of the In-Box apps that come with Windows 10. We have been using a customized version of a script that Michael Niehaus published in 2015. It uses PowerShell and an XML file with a list of apps to be removed. I have integrated it into my Windows 10 offline servicing script that I use to apply updates to my image each month.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
Disclaimer - if you manually bypass Feature Update blocks, you risk causing issues with your device. The blocks exist for a reason and should be respected. This information is provided for educational purposes only. Proceed with caution. Windows 10 Feature Updates are released twice per year. For each release, Microsoft has the ability to block the update from being installed or even showing up in Widows Update for applications/drivers/devices that have known compatibility issues.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
Do you know how hard it is to find things when you don’t know what to search for?? I’m paranoid. We recently upgraded our site to ConfigMgr 2002, first fast ring, then the hotfix. We also installed a Cloud Management Gateway, re-worked our Boundary Groups to handle VPN better, added a second Management Point and generally made a butt-load of changes to our environment to help our remote clients have access to content more easily.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
If you are here, you either know what a BADMIF is or Google brought you here after you searched for something like ‘Large number of BADMIFS’ or ‘Can I delete BADMIFS’ or something like that. Anyway, if you want great info on what MIFs are and some great in-depth troubleshooting steps for them, you should check out Umair Kahn’s post over on Tech Community (migrated from Technet). It’s a bit old, but still very relevant.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
When is your Always On VPN not Always On? An Always On VPN client uses a machine certificate to connect to the VPN gateway and connect to the network on startup. This feature is wonderful since it allows VPN clients to process machine group policies and even makes it easy for users with expired passwords to reset their passwords. But how can you verify that the machine channel is connected if you can’t see any indicators on the logon screen?| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
It’s been a few months since I’ve sat down to put write something. I’ve been taking a break trying to pick up some woodworking skills and spend a bit more time with the family during this COVID-19 lockdown. On March 5, I left work to take a week off for Spring Break and never returned to the office. Today is May 5. I wasn’t prepared for being at home and since I don’t regularly work from home, I don’t have any hardware here other than a normal desk setup.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
Update 09/14/2020 - You can download the Gather Light Task Sequence from the Community Hub now! https://communityhub.microsoft.com/item/7812 Update 02/21/2020 - I added a new section with a Gather Task Sequence. Check out the DIY Gather in the Task Sequence section below. It even has a GIF (unlike Software Center!) If you’ve used the Microsoft Deployment ToolKit (MDT) or ConfigMgr or have ever heard of ‘Johan and Mikael’, you’ve likely used or at least heard/read about using MDT and t...| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
I recently needed to query the Win32_UserProfile class in WMI for some reporting I was working on. This class is a default Hardware Inventory class in ConfigMgr. I noticed that we had a large number of devices were reporting NULL values for several properties in this class when I queried them in SQL so I decided to investigate. From the ConfigMgr console, I used CMPivot (only one of the best tools ever!| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
This post applies to Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager 1910 Current Branch At Microsoft Ignite 2019 Brad Anderson demoed a few things in his sessions, later covered more in depth in other sessions, that highlighted some new features to allow you to leverage the cloud console to manage ConfigMgr-only devices. As I watched these sessions, I realized that they were using the ConfigMgr Administration Service to do integrate into the cloud.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
I demoed this at MMS Jazz 2019 Tip and Tricks. This is Part 3 of a 3-part series. Part 1covers how to create a PowerShell script to lookup error messages. Part 2 covers creating an Azure Function. My goal is to use ConfigMgr ErrorCodes in a report in Power BI for easier deployment monitoring. As I mentioned in Part 1, the error text isn’t available in the ConfigMgr DB, so I created a PowerShell script to look up the error code.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
I demoed this at MMS Jazz 2019 Tip and Tricks. This is Part 2 of a 3-part series. Part 1 covers how to create a PowerShell script to lookup error messages. Part 3 covers how to create a Power BI function to use an Azure Function. I had heard of Azure Functions and I’ve written web API’s but I had never put the 2 together until I ran into this dilemma.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
I demoed this at MMS Jazz 2019 Tip and Tricks. This is Part 1 of a 3-part series. Part 2 covers creating an Azure Function. Part 3 covers how to create a Power BI function to use an Azure Function. If you have ever checked the logs in ConfigMgr, you’ve likely run across an error code in a format like 0x87D00664 or -2016410012. If use the error lookup feature in CMTrace, you can generally convert the error to plain text.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
I hope I never have to build another Task Sequence again. Seriously. Wouldn’t that be nice? I know that’s not truly feasible, but can’t a guy dream? It’s not that I dislike Task Sequences, it’s just that I strongly believe that Modern Desktop Management (AutoPilot/Device Reset/Feature Update servicing/etc.) is going to continue to improve and we should continue to attempt to adopt these tools with as much effort as we spend on customizing Task Sequences.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
This is the next installment in my Windows 10 Feature Updates series. Custom Actions Beginning in Windows 10 1803, custom actions were introduced and represent what Suma SaganeGowda referred to as a ‘poor man’s implementation of Task Sequences’ at Ignite 2018 in session BRK3027. Windows setup will check for the existence of these special folders and scripts and use them as part of the Feature Update process. They allow you to run scripts at various stages in the Feature Update process a...| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
This is the next installment in my Windows 10 Feature Updates series. Setupconfig.ini Setupconfig.ini is a file that can be used to pass command line arguments to the Windows Setup engine during a Windows installation. When Setupconfig.ini is specified in the command line (/ConfigFile ) or exists in the default location (%systemdrive%\Users\Default\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\WSUS\Setupconfig.ini), any arguments in it will take precedence over arguments specified in the commandline. If yo...| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
This is the first post of my Windows 10 Feature Updates series, probably totally out of sequence, but I just need to start getting the pieces written and published. So here goes. What is SetupDiag If you have worked with Windows 10 Operating System Deployments for any amount of time, you’ve likely had failures and encountered cryptic messages that you needed to triage. Hopefully you’ve come across SetupDiag. For the uninitiated, SetupDiag is a fancy little tool from Microsoft that you can...| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
As you may know, Steven Hosking and I recently started a YouTube channel called Intune.Training where we are walking through how to get started with Microsoft Intune each week. As we were recording our latest episode (coming soon) on Win32 applications, the demo failed when we attempted to install the application we had just built in Intune. We didn’t have time in the video to go through troubleshooting the issue, but I later determined the issue.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
I’ve never been a fan of alternate web browsers (Chrome, Firefox, etc), not because I don’t believe they may have better features than Internet Explorer or Edge, but because I live in the End User Computing space and find it easier to support users if I use the same browsers that they do. Even at home, I keep it simple and just use Edge or IE to help reduce my frustration of having different features depending on where I may be logged in each day.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
For the past few weeks I’ve been chasing some issues in my production ConfigMgr environment related to Windows 7 to Windows 10 upgrades and Windows 10 Feature Updates and SCCM Hardware Inventory. During that process, I found that several of my clients had successfully been upgraded, but were still reporting the old OS version in the ConfigMgr console. My search led to several root causes which I’m still working through, but the solution in most cases was to force a Full Hardware Inventory...| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
In my post Removing the Application Catalog Role after Upgrading to ConfigMgr 1806 I mentioned the error Failed to compile rule "{Rule_WRC10000}": 0x8000ffff and that we were unsure of it’s impact on the client. The product group assured us that the error was nothing to worry about and they were right - I have seen no ill effects on my clients, even though I continually see this error whenever the clients process machine policies.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
ConfigMgr 1906 Technical Preview was released last week and I immediately upgraded one of my tech preview labs I have running in Hyper-V on my laptop. As you may know, I’m a huge fan of the new AdminService functionality which will allow you to interact with the SMS Provider over HTTPS. With each release, it has had more features added. With Tech preview 1906, I noticed that you can run CMPivot using the AdminService.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
In a previous post I described how to deploy applications to users using Active Directory (AD) security groups as direct members of ConfigMgr collections. In this post, I’ll go over how to integrate the Microsoft Store for Business into your ConfigMgr console and review the various ways to deploy these apps from ConfigMgr. While Microsoft has done great job documenting individual parts of this process, I had to jump all over to find everything.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
I’m procrastinating prepping my sessions for MMS 2019 and decided I should write a blog post instead to help get me motivated. A few weeks ago I tweeted that my task sequence is built to be re-run if it fails and it will ‘pick up where it left off’. Several folks expressed interest in the idea so I wanted to share the general framework for having a task sequence that can be re-run after failure to complete the job.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
I was talking with my friend recently about how his and another friend’s jobs were going. The discussion centered around career paths - staying technical, changing fields or moving into supervision/management. We shared thoughts about our motivations for choosing a path and how we felt about ‘climbing the corporate ladder’ and the personal costs to do so. This really got me thinking about my career and how I’ve changed my career goals but more importantly, how marriage and children ha...| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
A few years ago, I needed to find a query that I had written in a SQL Stored Procedure but after clicking through several of them and striking out, I decided that there had to be a better way. I ended up writing a simple Stored Procedure with a single search parameter that would return a stored procedure definition and excerpt from it. I like it so much that I’ve added it to every database I’ve managed since then.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
About a month ago, I wrote a post for System Center Dudes related to the changes to recurring collection schedules in SCCM 1810. In our environment, we removed the default recurring schedules from about 1750 device collections that use Direct membership rules. Up until that point, we had seen some strange collection behaviors, but never at the level that we began to experience them post ConfigMgr 1810. (Let me stop here and say that 1810 didn’t break anything.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
This post is dedicated to the System Center Configuration Manger (SCCM/ConfigMgr) Administration Service (AdminService for short). Please check back here for helpful links and to blog posts, documentation and examples for using the AdminService. Please note, I wasn’t sure what the name was officially when I first started, and I didn’t expect to keep posting new info about it, so sorry if it’s disjointed. Update: 11/3/2109 - I am updating this post to show information for the the latest ...| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
Last week, my coworker was in the process of cleaning up some old versions of our core applications and ran into an issue deleting an app. When she attempted to delete it, she got a message indicating that the application was used in a Task Sequence. Unfortunately, the dialog doesn’t offer any additional information as to WHICH Task Sequence is using the application. She asked me for help and here’s what we ended learning.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
As you may know, I started working for System Center Dudes as a ConfigMgr consultant a few months ago. I finally found time to write my first post for their site. If you haven’t already seen it, head over and check out it out. https://www.systemcenterdudes.com/sccm-remove-recurring-schedules-collections-script/| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
I’m not a big New Year’s resolution guy but I do believe that looking back at the previous year as well as setting goals for the coming year helps set up a framework for success. For this post, I’d like to share some personal and professional highlights from 2018. Personal Family To start, I’m writing this sitting next to my wife Megan as we fly back to Houston after spending 10 amazing days in Thailand celebrating 15 years of marriage.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
Note 03/12/2019 - This post has been updated to support changes in 1901 TP and (I assume) 1902 CB to the TSProgressUI.exe ConfigMgr client component used for the custom described dialog below. Note: You must be running ConfigMgr/SCCM 1810 or higher to use the _SMSTSLastActionName variable included in this post. However you can use the same concepts and error dialog with previous versions (but seriously, upgrade already!). Also, go upvote the UserVoice item to have the product do this natively.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
At MMS Desert Edition (MMSDE) this week, I got into a (friendly) heated debate over what qualified as BBQ where the other party offered up some very silly arguments related to pulled pork and vinegar sauce. I’m a firm believer in meat. Period. Cook it however you want, call it whatever you want. I just want to eat it. This discussion led to some additional ‘South Bashing’ by this ‘Yankee’ from North Carolina.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
I began testing the ConfigMgr SMS Provider API (or AdminService as it will be called) in the 1810 Technical Preview and wrote 2 posts about it (1) & (2). With the release of the AdminService in Current Branch 1810, a few things have changed and I wanted to provide an update. Additonally, I’ve had the opportunity to chat with the ConfigMgr Product Group at #MMSDE this week and they’ve provided some roadmap information about the API and what to expect in the future.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
I recently had a request to make the Continue on PC feature work on our standard Windows 10 devices. Continue on PC is a Windows 10 feature that allows users to use the Edge browser on their phone then continue the browsing session on their PC. As I started testing the feature in Windows 10, I found that the setting was disabled with the message Some settings are hidden or managed by your organization.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
Be sure to check out the sequel to this post Building an Even Better Task Sequence. I’ve had this post in the queue for a while now and have been working on a script to help with some of this, but with the release of System Center Configuration Manager 1810 I don’t have to hack something together anymore! One of the best new features which allows us to capture the name of the last action using the new variable _SMSTSLastActionName.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
If you have been keeping up with SCCM/ConfigMgr release notes, you will have seen that in 1806, you no longer need to have the Application Catalog Role installed in order to enable User Available applications in Software Center (if you didn’t already know, yeah, that was a requirement previously). If you were like me, this was one of your first actions after upgrading to 1806. Unfortunately, there appears to be a bug with removing the role that causes clients to stop seeing User Available s...| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
There are numerous types of application and deployment options in ConfigMgr/SCCM today. Everything from traditional MSI to the new MSIX and Windows Store apps. Throw in Co-Management and Intune and you get even more options. Deployments can be targeted to specific devices and users. Most companies use some mix of these to get software onto devices. Some people even still refuse to use the Application model in ConfigMgr in favor of the Package model because of that one time they had trouble wi...| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
Update 12/04/2018: Check out the latest info on the SMS Provider API. I posted last week about the OData connector that is included in ConfigMgr Technical Preview 1810. I did some more digging this past weekend and made a few more discoveries. Additionally, I ran into some issues during testing and was able to get in touch with some of the team working on the new AdminService and they gave me some great insight on my findings.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
If you have worked with SCCM/ConfigMgr Task Sequences for any length of time, you’ve likely needed to debug them. Many times, you need to check the value of a Task Sequence variable. The generally accepted approach is to add a Run Command Line step to your Task Sequence and run ServiceUI.exe like this: ServiceUI.exe -process:TSProgressUI.exe cmd.exe This approach is great if you planned ahead and you are in a test Task Sequence.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
This is Part 5 in my Configuring 802.1x Authentication for Windows Deployment series. Be sure to check out all of the other parts. A few months ago, when I published the first 4 parts on this series, I was unaware that there was a web service available for managing Cisco ISE, which is the NAC that I have to work with in my environment. I was fortunate to meet with a peer who works nearby and he shared a script demonstrating how to interact with the Cisco ISE External RESTful Service (ERS) to ...| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
The more I dig in to SCCM/ConfigMgr, the more cool things I find. Every time I read a new post blog about things people have done with their Task Sequences, I get inspired to try more things. One of those things is setting Task Sequence variable values from the output of a script. At this point, I’m sure we’ve all read and re-read Gary Blok’s Waas posts and picked up a few tricks, I know I have.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
For the past few months, there has been a community-wide push to determine the optimal approach for Offline Servicing Windows 10 media and to get Microsoft to take on more of this burden so we can get on with other tasks instead of dealing with servicing every month. Ultimately, Microsoft needs a better process for updating media each month, but until they do, all we can do is what we do best, Socially Engineer solutions.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
I found this issue today and hope to get some help from the ConfigMgr team on it but figured it was worth writing up the workaround for now. The Issue While attempting to perform a user state backup on a machine using an SCCM task sequence, we received the error in SMSTS.LOG: Failed to decrypt state encryption key (0x80070057) Failed to run the action: Request User State Storage. The parameter is incorrect.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
Update 10/1/2018 - Check out my latest post Part 5 below. You may be able to skip all of the other stuff!! The Links first so you don’t have to scroll so far. These are also on the menu at top for easy access. Since I ended up with so much content for this topic, I felt that it warranted a landing page. Hopefully you will be able to easily navigate through these topics and find some useful nuggets to save yourself some headaches down the road.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
This is the Tips and Tricks section of my Configuring 802.1x Authentication for Windows Deployment series. Be sure to check out all of the other parts here. These are just some random things I found while going through this. File and Registry Locations Profiles C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\dot3svc\Profiles HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\dot3svc Policies C:\Windows\dot3svc\Policies*.TMP (rename TMP to XML to see the Policy and Profile) HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\...| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
This is Part 4 in my Configuring 802.1x Authentication for Windows Deployment series. Be sure to check out all of the other parts here. Quick Note About Cisco Switch Firmware If you’ve made it this far, a word of caution. Make sure that your switch firmware is matched to the version required by ISE. I spent several weeks working with our Security and Networking guys to troubleshoot and discovered that our switches weren’t at the required version for ISE 2.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
This is Part 3 in my Configuring 802.1x Authentication for Windows Deployment series. Be sure to check out all of the other parts here. You will need all of the files you created in Part 1 for this part. During a Bare Metal/Wipe & Load OSD Task Sequence, the Task Sequence will start in WinPE and copy down the OS installation files. Once Windows as been installed, the Task Sequence will boot out of WinPE and into the new OS.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
This is Part 2 in my Configuring 802.1x Authentication for Windows Deployment series. Be sure to check out all of the other parts here. Note: I don’t have 802.1x setup in a lab to show how to configure the 802.1x service on the server side. However, I do know that you will need to configure your 802.1x service to allow PXE traffic. I believe that Cisco ISE has a setting already that you can just turn on to allow it.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
This is Part 1 in my Configuring 802.1x Authentication for Windows Deployment series. Be sure to check out all of the other parts here. The Anatomy of an 802.1x Configuration Script These are the basic steps need to be performed by your auth script. The code below is commented to help understand what each step is for. Set Wired Autoconfig (dot3svc) service startup to Auto Start Wired Autoconfig Import Configuration Profile Import Certificates Force adapter authentication event You may be look...| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
WARNING!! 8/21/2018 - The following steps will enable Dynamic Updates for Windows 10 In-Place Upgrade. If you have not serviced your WIM with THE LATEST Cumulative updates - like today is patch Tuesday and you haven’t updated your WIM with today’s CU, proceed with caution! Your Enabling Dynamic Updates will allow your clients to go to the internet and download the latest Cumulative Update and install it during the upgrade. This is an extra ~800 MB per client from the internet.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
UPDATE - See Part 2 Here WARNING!! 8/21/2018 - The following steps will enable Dynamic Updates for Windows 10 In-Place Upgrade. If you have not serviced your WIM with THE LATEST Cumulative updates - like today is patch Tuesday and you haven’t updated your WIM with today’s CU, proceed with caution! Your Enabling Dynamic Updates will allow your clients to go to the internet and download the latest Cumulative Update and install it during the upgrade.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
Our Windows 7 Reference Image was originally built in 2011. At the time, we had some consultants in helping us migrate from Windows XP to Windows 7. At the time, the consultant who was building the image edited the Local Group Polices on the Windows 7 machine prior to capturing it. Since then, we’ve continued to service the WIM and use it as our production image. Some years later, we were trying to change our Windows Update settings and found these nice Local Group Policies just sitting the...| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
While trying to set the KeyboardLocale in my ConfigMgr/SCCM Task Sequence, I found that my settings weren’t getting updated during the Task Sequence. I used to think that custom Unattend.XML that you include in your Task Sequence would be used as-is. I was wrong. I did a bit of digging and here’s what I discovered. FYI: I’m using ConfigMgr/SCCM with MDT integrated and I’m using an MDT Task Sequence built in ConfigMgr as the basis for this discussion.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
Today I was writing a report to help audit collection settings to ensure we aren’t unnecessarily updating collections due to the wrong checkboxes being set (a topic for another day). As I was searching for offending collections, I would copy the collection name from my report then paste into the search box and hit Enter. I also had the All Subfolders search option selected. Generally, I wait about a minute for searches to come back when searching from a top level folder.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
This week, we were working on testing Windows 7 to Windows 10 In-Place Upgrades and ran into an issue where our clients weren’t updating their Operating System version in the ConfigMgr console. After some helpful responses on Twitter, I was able to add a client action trigger step to the end of my Task Sequence. In my production environment, we have a child task sequence that we call that has several client action steps in it including Request Machine Assignments (Machine Policies) {0000000...| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
UPDATE #3 - 6/28/2018 Feel free to read below, however, if you want the quick solution, check out Marc’s updated blog post. He’s put together a simple solution to this issue. http://blog.ctglobalservices.com/configuration-manager-sccm/mag/devicemap-and-device-inventory-failures-in-win7-to-win10-1709-in-place-upgrades/ UPDATE #2 - 5/24/2018 After posting this, I came across these https://twitter.com/jarwidmark/status/998591545392685057 and http://blog.ctglobalservices.com/configuration-man...| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
In case you missed it, Check out my guest blog post over on http://www.DeploymentResearch.com. Thanks Johan Ardwidmark for the opportunity. While you’re there, be sure to check out all of the other awesome resources available like the Hydration Kit For Windows Server 2016 and ConfigMgr Current Technical Preview Branch.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
Sorry for all the words. Skip to the end if you just want the punchline Have you ever had one of those weeks where you just bang your head against the same wall and eventually get some relief? Sometimes, your head breaks open, but other times, the wall breaks. Well I just had one of those weeks but I’m not sure how I feel about where this all ended up.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
Today was supposed to be easy. Things were just supposed to work. We had been testing our ConfigMgr Task Sequence for a few weeks and today was cutover day. We had made some backend changes to our Windows 7 Task Sequence to help get ready for our upcoming Windows 10 migration (I know, haven’t upgraded yet! Get off my case!). Earlier in the week, we found one last item that needed to be added.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
Do you ever need to email or post ConfigMgr log files or snippets online for blogs or support? I know I do. I wanted to have a way to consistently clean log files quickly, so I wrote a small PowerShell script to help. It’s nothing special - the hardest part is figuring out which regular expressions work best for each data type you want to replace. I ended up with 4 regular expressions that work well for the smsts.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
We have several generations of HP ProLiant servers in our environment. We recently upgraded SCCM to 1710 then applied ADK 1709. We have been imaging these servers using the ADK 1703 Boot Image without issue. After upgrading to ADK 1709 and creating new boot images, we are unable to boot to into WinPE on any of our Gen9 servers. After doing the standard diagnostics (testing old, testing new, updating drivers, updating firmware, etc) we found that these servers would still freeze after download...| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
Several months ago, my boss came back from Microsoft Ignite where he ‘drank the Kool-Aid’ big time. We had been telling him about all of the amazing things that were being released to help with the move to Modern Windows Management with Windows 10 for months but he got to hear it directly from some of the experts and got really excited. One of the things he suggested looking into came from a session with Mike Nystrom and Johan Arwidmark called Expert-level Windows 10 deployment (Skip to 5...| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
We have built an SCCM In-Place upgrade task sequence to migrate our enterprise from Windows 7 Enterprise to Windows 10 Enterprise. We have been using the same basic TS for over a year without issues. With the release of Windows 10 Fall Creators Update (1709), we began having issues upgrading certain devices and were seeing error code 0xC1900204, indicating Invalid SKU. Windows setup looks at the existing OS, install media and the command line image number to validate that the existing and des...| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
I guess that’s how I’m supposed to start out. If you want to know more about me or my site name, please visit the About page before proceeding. I’ll wait. Welcome back! As you can see, I’m not an expert, but I have been doing this for a while and just wanted to have a place to call my own where I can post with more than characters on Twitter. I hope that I will be able to add value to the community.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
What’s A Square Dozen? A gross (unit) refers to a group of 144 items which can also be called a square dozen. Square Dozen = Gross My name is Adam Gross A. Gross A Square Dozen About the Author My name is Adam Gross. I’m a husband, father of 3 kids and Christ follower. I have a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Information Systems from Louisiana Tech University and have been working in various areas of desktop client management since 1998.| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog
I went to Microsoft Ignite 2018 for the first time this year. During the week, I got to chat with lots of folks, including some of the SCCM/ConfigMgr product group. Mark Silvey was kind enough to chat with me about plans for the OData connector that was first introduced in ConfigMgr 1612 Technical Preview. When it was first released it was called CMRestProvider and it had to be enabled in the console (you can read more about this initial implementation here).| A Square Dozen | A. Gross Blog