Deploying Windows 8 and Customizing the Lock Screen with ConfigMgr 2012

This week my post will be about the deployment of Windows 8 and then with a customized lock screen. One of the main complaints about a customized deployment of Windows 8 was that it wasn’t possible to set a customized lock screen without using unsupported methods of “hacking” file permissions and replacing the pictures. This has changed since the cumulative update of November for Windows 8 (see also here). One of the nice adjustments with this cumulative update is that it enables enterprise customers to customize the default lock screen. This setting is introduced as a Group Policy –setting, named Force a specific default lock screen image. In this post I’m not going to use the Group Policy –setting, but only the corresponding registry value …

Read more

Deploying Windows 8 including Optional Windows Features with ConfigMgr 2012

This week my post will be about the deployment about the deployment of Windows 8 and then including optional Windows features. I already did a post like this about Windows Server 2012, and the methods are similar, but I’m still getting, and seeing, lots of questions about how it works for Windows 8. So what I really want to show in this post are the different options for deploying Windows 8 including some random Optional Windows Feature(s). The three most used options for this are DISM, Powershell and MDT. Well, actually, to be really correct, there is only one option to install Features in Windows 8 and that’s DISM. Both, Powershell and MDT are just different methods for calling DISM actions. In the rest of …

Read more

An overview of my posts about ConfigMgr 2012 SP1

Let’s start my first post, of this new year, with an overview of my latest post about ConfigMgr 2012 Service Pack (SP) 1. Normally I’m not really the kind of person that looks back, but in this case it’s with a reason, as most of my posts where with pre-release versions of SP1. I also tried to sort all my posts per subject, even though sometimes there is some overlap. The following posts are all tested, this week, with the RTM version of SP1 and I can confirm that they are still working: System Center Orchestrator Tweeting the deployment status of a system via Orchestrator and ConfigMgr 2012 Using a Status Filter Rule to delete a collection membership via Orchestrator and ConfigMgr 2012 New and …

Read more