The Experience Blog

Still on vacation for a few more days and just warming up the blog pen for the autumn and winter to come. What’s not better than to submit your best desktop background pictures with the theme “Swedish summer” and the chance to win Windows 7? The competition information is in Swedish but for those of you who wants to know how fabulous Sweden can look like (at least a couple of months every year) :) have a look at the competition gallery.

A couple of weeks ago I got the announcement that I have been re-awarded with the MVP award by Microsoft. Congratulations goes to all fellow MVP:s such which also got re-awarded, for example Joachim Nässlander, Magnus Björk and Martin Lidholm.

Being at TechEd in North America last week it seems that ACT 5.6 was released on Monday last week. Among the improvements are tools for migrating to the 64-bit platform, including a 64-bit version of the Compatibility Administrator.

The assessment overview is something that also has been improved and I strongly recommend you to download and intall this tool if you are making an inventory for upgrading to Windows 7.

Download at MS Download Center.

Deployment Guru Johan Arwidmark wrote a blog post today stating that there is now a hotfix that resolves a rather common problem during deployment, where one after the deployment get to choose the network location although the profile used is the domain profile and the location therefore should be “Work”. The fix has KB article number 2028749.

Something different for a change. For all Swedes out there there is a competition going on where you can win one of five copies of Windows 7 Ultimate Edition. You compete by sending in the best desktop background picture you have and the theme is Swedish nature. More information (in Swedish) here!

So the small but never the less useful tool Volume Activation Management Tool (VAMT) 2.0 has been released. Use it to keep track of your licenses, do activations and much more! Read more on it at the Windows Team Blog.

In MDT 2010 you can enable two settings that during deployment of your machines will patch them automatically using a WSUS server of your choice.

Take a look at your existing task sequence(s) and look for “Windows Update (Pre-Application Installation)” and “Windows Update (Post-Application Installation)” and choose to enable them both or just the latter.

In your customsettings.ini somewhere beneath the [Default] section add the row:

WSUSServer=http://WSUSServerName

It seems System Center Online Desktop Manager has been re-branded as Windows Intune, and it was just presented at MMS in Las Vegas. What Windows Intune do is to provide means to manage and monitor Windows 7 clients in the cloud. This is recommended for 25-500 PC:s.

What it does for you:

• Patch management – keeps your machines updated and report back to you.
• Unwanted code – keeps your machines clear of all unwanted code, or malware to be specific.
• Inventory  – provide you with software and hardware inventory.
• Security policies – centrally manage policies for firewall and malware protection settings.
• Remote Assistance – connect to your client machines regardless of where they are with remote assistance.
• Threats and alerts – recevice information from the clients to proactively monitor health and status.

More at: http://www.windowsintune.com/

What you see in the score for your Windows Vista and Windows 7 machines, you know the score in System properties and Performance and information tools, really comes from the command line tool “winsat”. To find out some very detailed performance specs on your machine and the specific hardware parts such as hard drive, graphics card, memory and such you can run the command winsat with a number of switches.

For instance “winsat disk” runs performance tests on my disks and present it in detail with read/write speeds etc along with the score on each individual test. Give it a try!

If you think that you have come a far way making sure all users are running as standard users you must stop and rethink. Well, having all users as standard users is very good from many perspectives but with coming challenges your efforts must not stop there. A growing problem is the fact that more and more applications install in the user space, i.e. in the \users\username\appdata directory instead of the traditional “Program files”.

Also Windows 7 contain Windows Installer 5.0 which sports a new feature which makes the software vendors easily make Windows Installer (MSI files) that install software in the user space instead of program files, and thereby not requiring the user to be administrator or even require a UAC prompt for credentials for an administrative account.

The standard users of course think this is great, meaning they after all can install and run for instance Google Chrome without needing to ask that restrictive IT department. From the IT departments view this fact that standard users can install and run applications is a concern.

The answer to take care of this problem is simply the new Windows feature AppLocker. To be honest it is somewhat like Software Restriction Policies (SRP) but whatever bad things you have heard about SRP you can forget about them. AppLocker contains new features that make the implementation and ongoing management very easy compared to Software Restriction Policies. More about AppLocker in the AppLocker walkthrough.