Applications

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 Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 8 with ConfigMgr 2012

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This week I want to devote a post to deploying the Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) for Windows 8 using ConfigMgr 2012. Even though the installer is only available as a Windows Update Standalone Installer, in my opinion it should be deployed using the application model in ConfigMgr 2012. This gives me the possibility to show some basics about the manual applications in ConfigMgr 2012 and more specifically, about the Detection Rules and the Requirements. In a step-by-step way I will go through the wizards of creating and deploying an application. During this I will give some extra explanation with the step about the Detection Rule, as it has to be manually created and there are many options for that. RSAT for Windows 8 can …

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Deploy App-V version of Office 2013 with ConfigMgr 2012

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One of the new features coming with the Service Pack 1 release of ConfigMgr 2012 is the support for App-V 5. So what is a better way to try this feature then deploying the just released Microsoft Office 2013 Preview AppV packages in combination with the just released App-V 5.0 Beta 2 Desktop Client. But then the big question is, how can we deploy this? Well, I thought it was pretty straight forward, but there where a few caveats that everyone should know and pay attention to. Challenge 1: App-V Package Name The first thing I ran into was that I couldn’t import the Microsoft Office 2013 Preview App-V package in ConfigMgr. It appeared that the default configured Package Name was to long for a …

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