USMT 4.0 update now migrates Office 2010 settings

Right smack in the middle of the deployment roadshow talking about deploying Windows 7. Tomorrow it is time for the fourth city (Linköping) and it will be our pleasure to announce that USMT 4.0 now finally migrates Office 2010 settings, as of a few hours ago. Download and install from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2023591 and follow the instructions for updating the USMT components if you ar eusing LiteTouch or ZeroTouch deployments.

Top three posts of 2010 + six favorites

Looking at some stats for last year it seems that the most popular posts were actually from 2009. How to clean out the Windows\Installer folder along with the guide on how to install Nvidia drivers on laptops when all else fails were the most popular ones. The guide on how to troubleshoot blue screens of death is as always popular as well.

Some of my favorite posts are:

• Case of the mysterious issues caused by UAC in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2
• Standard users installing applications: Say welcome to the new reality
• How to list performance issues with your Vista or Windows 7 machine
• Beware of saved credentials
• Guide on how to replace WinRE with DaRT
• Case of the AppLocker default rules issue

Windows 7 deployment A-Z workshop

In January and February next year me and Johan Arwidmark will go on a tour visiting eight cities all over Sweden, talking but foremost demoing and guiding you to a successful Windows 7 deployment and project. More information (in Swedish) can be found here!

MAP 5.5 (beta) gives you total control over IE migration

This week has been really intensive with a 5 day course on depoying Windows 7, including the MAP (Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit). As always there were a lot of interesting discussions related to Internet Explorer, which many times casues problems when migrating to a later operating system. One of the major problems with IE migrations are that we have little control and historically had problems assessing the current IE, web apps or web browser status. The answer came a couple of nights ago, in the latest beta MAP.

MAP 5.5 beta brings the possibility to inventory for which IE and third party browsers that are used in your organization, which default browsers are set but you will also see all activex controls and browser helper objects are being used, including a count number ith how many times for instance a particular activex control has been used. This is some really great information that will for sure help us in the migrating process when deploying Windows 7.

Get your hands on the beta from Microsoft Connect.

Windows 7 deployment day – teaser by Johan Arwidmark

On November 25 me and some colleagues from Knowledge Factory as well as Specops Software and AddSkills will be hosting a Windows 7 deployment day. Johan Arwirdmark gives a short teaser…

Optimize your VDI clients using VBscript tool

When running Windows clients in the “cloud”, i.e. virtual Windows clients, there are several things to note and to take into considerations. For instance what will happen every wednesday night at 01:00 when all your X number of Windows clients will start defragmenting their virtual disks? Probably this scenario will significantly impact performance negatively on your virtual cluster disks.

There are many more actions you can take to optimize your clients in a VDI scenario and thanks to Jonathan Bennett this action is very smooth. Run the tool VDI Optimizer and choose what you want to be turned off and out comes a VBscript that you can run for instance at deploy time.

HOW TO: Search non indexed libraries in Start menu

By default when you search using the search box in the start menu in Windows 7, it only returns indexed content. This is by design. However there might be scenarios where you might want to also search libraries which are not indexed and for this scenario there is a hotfix that enables a registry settings that controls this behavior. It is documented in Microsoft KB article 2268596.

RemoteApps integrated in Windows 7 – does not need 2008 R2 fully

Just a quick tip that you do not need to have your entire RDS environment at the Windows Server 2008 R2 level to be able to utilize the nice integration features of RemoteApps in Windows 7. I am referring to the feature of subscribing to a feed of applications and thereby have a dynamic publishing of RemoteApps for the ends users, in the users start menu.

To get this working all you need is a Windows Server 2008 R2 to host the RDS Web Access role, which then can include and publish RemoteApp sources that are based on Windows Server 2008 hosts (no R2 requirements there).

Windows client security lockdown with nifty tool from Microsoft

It’s been around for some time and if you did not already know about it Microsoft provide the free tool called Security Compliance Manager. You can use it to very easily manage and export a set of pre-configured (or settings that you configure on your own) settings that improve security. You can then export these settings to for instance a group policy and import it into your domain.

There are templates with pre-configured security lockdowns for Windows XP, Windows Vista and of course also Windows 7. The tool works great for creating a security baseline for your client machines but the only downside is that you cannot import nor in a convenient way compare the settings in the templates with what you currently have.

No more duplicate drivers in ConfigMgr, thanks to a patch!

So to end the pain of handling duplicate drivers in System Center Configuration Manager there has been a hotfix released that resolves the issue with “The selected driver has already been imported at this site”, at least partly, depening on what method your are using to apply drivers. Read more about the affected scenarios at the Mike Niehaus blog and download the hotfix from Microsoft.