The new Teams client is now a MSIX that we need to deploy. We have a tool for this called teamsbootstrapper.exe which gets new features all the time. The official Microsoft documentation can be found here Bulk deploy the new Microsoft Teams desktop client – Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Learn   Teamsbootstrapper.exe support both online and offline installation of the Teams MSIX file, where online downloads the latest MSIX installer dynamically. We could deploy the MSIX using Intune/Configuration Manager but then we need to update the MSIX file from time to time to not deploy an old version ..read more

This will be a short post on how to update WinPE boot images with a Cumulative Update as we need to do that now with the release of May 2023 Cumulative Update to address CVE-2023-24932. Spent all day with colleagues to try to test what happens to OS deployment (and AutoPilot) when deploying the mitigation for CV-2023-24932 and re imaging a computer. There are still a lot of testing left with this update and the mitigations but one thing that is needed is to update the boot images used in Configuration Manager and MDT for example. Here is a quick script https://github.com/Ccmexec/MEMCM-OSD-Scr ..read more

When we move workloads to Intune in our Co-Management scenarios we lose some features we have been using and need to go back to basic. In this short post we will install updates during OSD using the PSWindowsUpdate module which is great. When we moved the Windows Update workload and uninstalled WSUS we need another way of installing updates. I did a lot of testing and excluding drivers and all updates with “preview” in the title works really well. Start by saving the PSWindowsUpdate module to a temp directory on a computer, we download it so we can add it to our CM Package we us to install up ..read more

One request that was made many times in the comments of the blog posts on TSBackground which is a remarkable tool from Johan Schrewelius, is to be able to show which DP is being used during OSD. I will try to explain the challenges with displaying DP information using TSBackground and some ways of doing it. The existing variable can be used without TSBackground as well of course to tattoo the registry for example with DPs used. Which will give us the following result. Sample TSBackground More information about TSBackground can be found here: https://onevinn.schrewelius.it/Apps01.html and here ..read more

A few days ago, we experienced performance issues when querying a ConfigMgr DB view. A very simple query: “SELECT Name, MachineID, IsActive, AADDeviceID FROM v_CombinedDeviceResources WHERE CoManaged = ‘1’” could take up to a minute to complete. Since we already knew that “v_CombinedDeviceResources” is the source from where the Device view in the ConfigMgr console pulls its data we dug into the smsprov.log and looked up the query issued by the console when loading the view. We found that apart from the query being “long”, the console added an Option to force “Legacy Cardinality Estimation” to ..read more

Now that Cloud Management Gateway (Classic Service classic) is deprecated and will be removed in the future releases of Configuration Manager after 1 March 2022 we can now longer deploy a CMG using the cloud service (classic). This is most likely due the fact that Classic VMs is being removed in Azure as the link below shows. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/classic-vm-deprecation. Which options do we have to migrate then? It depends on the Cloud Management Gateway is configured today if it uses a custom DNS domain name or a *.cloudapp.net name. If a custom DNS name is ..read more

One of my favorite features in Windows 11 is the folders we can enable on the Start Menu. They are discrete and easy to access. Unfortunately, the Start Menu folders are not enabled by default which I would very much approve if they were! These are the folders we are talking about. They can manually be turned on in Settings > Personalization > Start > Folders as shown below. We can however enable them using CSP in Windows 11 but there is no way of doing it using Group Policy or registry settings. More information on the CSP can be found here: Policy CSP – Start – Windows Client Man ..read more

In Windows 11 we can no longer deploy a custom Start Menu layout as we could in Windows 10. We don’t have any “Partial” managed option either as we had in Windows 10. The Group Policy “Start Layout” can still be used to deploy a custom Taskbar layout, HOWEVER the end user can no longer pin apps to the Start Menu if it’s deployed to the client, more on that topic here: Modify Windows 11 Taskbar during OSD, Intune and GPO – CCMEXEC.COM – Enterprise Mobility What can we do if we are not using Intune then? There is an option for OEMs to pin applications to the Start Menu by using a “LayoutModific ..read more

When it comes to modifying the TaskBar in Windows 11 nothing has changed since Windows 10. The only change is that the Start Menu part of the XML file is no longer used, it has been replaced by a .json file. More on that in the next post. More information can be found here on Microsoft Docs: Configure and customize Windows 11 taskbar – Configure Windows | Microsoft Docs What do we need to modify the TaskBar then? We need an .XML file as shown below as sample. It will remove everything and replace it with Edge and File Explorer. Sample .XML file <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> ..read more

I was determined not to do any customization of the Start button location, but I couldn’t keep my hands off. There are some useful registry keys that we can use to set the default location of the Start Button and hide Task View, Chat icon for example during OSD or AutoPilot for that matter using a PowerShell script. The really cool part is that the Start menu moves as soon as you set the registry value as shown below. We could make it look like below example, not saying that you should that is up to you. The following settings can be changed using the registry. Start button alignment – 0 = L ..read more