Last week Microsoft released Remote Desktop Connection Manager version 2.7 (aka RDCMan). It has some really cool features and supports Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2. This tool is essential if you run a lot of virtual machines. One of the new features allows the ability to connect directly to virtual machines (called virtual machine connect-to-console support). …
I am really honored to have been a speaker at the first ever Midwest Management Summit (aka the new MMS), that took place November 10th – 12th in Minnesota. This event was the who’s who of systems management and did not disappoint. There were over 100 sessions delivered in three days by 50+ experts (which included 32 Microsoft…
Recently, I was curious to see if I could get 1E PXE Everywhere (included with 1E Nomad) to boot a MDT Lite Touch boot image. Since PXE Everywhere integrates with System Center Configuration Manager, it automatically creates the necessary BCD files based on the ConfigMgr boot images. So that left me with using the command line…
If you have worked with ConfigMgr much, you know that uses WMI to stores tons of information. WMI uses the CIM_DATETIME format, which looks like this: yyyymmddHHMMSS.mmmmmmsUUU. In order to work with this in PowerShell, you need to convert it into something that the Get-Date cmdlet can understand. Here are two ways that you can accomplish this: Using…
Last month I had the honor of speaking at my first ever IT/Dev Connections in sunny Las Vegas. I had the pleasure of presenting on Building the Ultimate Operating System Task Sequence with my coworker and good friend Troy Martin. As promised, we have completed publishing a series of blogs on all the topics in…
If you spend a lot of time creating ConfigMgr 2012 R2 OSD Task Sequences, you probably have a method for inserting the steps and groups that you like to use in every TS you create. Maybe you open a reference TS up and copy and paste steps into a new TS that you are creating. …
I was doing an OSD project about 5 years ago when I came up with the idea of automatically opening the smsts.log file using Trace32 (now replaced by CMTrace). I am always up for a challenge to see if something can be done, so I set out to see if I could make it happen. …
Back in the ConfigMgr 2007 days, I wrote a similar blog called ConfigMgr OSD: Always including certain files in your Boot Images -think Trace32. I figured it was time to create a similar one for ConfigMgr 2012 since some things have changed. Even though CMTrace is now included in the boot image by default, there…
We are planning on having our fifth meeting of 2014. This meeting will be held at ***Interface Technical Training***: 3110 North Central Avenue, Suite 160, Phoenix, AZ 85012, September 11th . The meeting will start at **5:00 PM** with the welcome time at 4:30 PM-come early and socialize a bit. Kent and Mike will be…
I will be presenting the next 1E webinar – Minimize your ConfigMgr Footprint and Maximize Reliability and Performance. So if you are currently planning your new ConfigMgr 2012 design or you are looking at ways to trim back your current ConfigMgr 2012 hierarchy, join me on Thursday, May 22nd at 11:00 ET and learn how this can be easily achieved with…
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