Windows 8

Deploying Windows 8 and Customizing the Lock Screen with ConfigMgr 2012

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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 …

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Deploying Windows 8 including Optional Windows Features with ConfigMgr 2012

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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 …

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An overview of my posts about ConfigMgr 2012 SP1

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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 …

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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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Migrating to Windows 8 by using hard-links with ConfigMgr 2012

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After the release of Windows 8 last week we can already start thinking about migrating. When I’m thinking about migrations I always like the computer-refresh scenario’s where we can use hard-links. In this post I will show a basic task sequence to capture user files and settings, either offline or online, with help of hard-links. I already showed the basics of that in an earlier post last year when ConfigMgr 2012 was still in Beta. Since then the Wizard screens have not changed so I will not show that again, but  I will show some more information about what happens. Prerequisites To support migrating to Windows 8 we need ConfigMgr 2012 SP1 (which is currently still CTP) in place with at least the following packages: …

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