Month: November 2012

New and Improved: Pre-provision user applications during OS deployment via Orchestrator and ConfigMgr 2012

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Last week I did a post about pre-provisioning user applications, based on group membership, during OS deployment, which I already thought was pretty cool. I got some nice positive feedback on that post, including a comment of my very well respected colleague and ConfigMgr MVP Kim Oppalfens. He said, “Nice find, but what if you have twenty applications?”. Well, my idea of last week would mean two task sequence steps per applications, so that’s not really an option for a lot of applications… I had to come up with something better. The biggest challenge about this is that Orchestrator can only return static variables, it’s not possible to return dynamically named variables from a runbook. This meant that the only option left, to really achieve …

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Pre-provision user applications, based on group membership, during OS deployment via Orchestrator and ConfigMgr 2012

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This week it’s time for another, in my opinion, very cool post with the combination of Orchestrator and ConfigMgr 2012 (and MDT 2012 Update 1). In this post I want to use the user, set with User Device Affinity, to pre-provision applications, based on group membership, on a device during the initial deployment of the device. Out-of-the-box User Device Affinity can be used to pre-deploy user-targeted application to a device and it can be set during the deployment of a device. This way it will start receiving applications very quick after the deployment. Basically I’m going to show in this post how to set User Device Affinity via a task sequence and how to use that username to install only specific applications for that user …

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Deploying Windows 8 with the UE-V 1.0 Agent via ConfigMgr 2012

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This week I will do a post about deploying the recent released UE-V 1.0 Agent. Even though there is a great guide, named UE-V Deployment Guide, included with the installation files, I noticed that there is a small piece “missing” for a deployment, with Windows 8, via a task sequence. When I just added the agent to my task sequence, to deploy Windows 8, I noticed that the agent wasn’t installing during the deployment. After looking at the Installation log file and after running the installer on a clean system, I saw that the Offline Files Service (CscService) needs to be running before the installation will run (see screenshot). It seems that the Offline Files Service on Windows 8, by default, is set to Automatic …

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How to change the language in Windows PE via ConfigMgr 2012

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A few weeks ago I already did some post about new task sequence variables. This week my post will be about another new (task sequence) variable. This one will probably not be used often, but can be very useful in some specific situations. Think about situations where the company demands that the language of everything that a user can see is displayed in the users’ own language. In this post I will use the German language as an example. Prerequisites The only prerequisite for the configuration is that the task sequence resource file (tsres.dll) exists in, in this case, the German language folder (<ConfigMgrInstallFolder>\OSD\bin\x64\00000407\tsres.dll) before updating the boot image. In case the file doesn’t exist, it can be simply installed/ created by following the next …

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