Handling Unexpected Reboots During Autopilot

A thread spun up internally around unexpected reboots happening during Autopilot. A suggestion to the person who opened the thread was to remove their Windows Update Ring in Intune and see if the behavior goes away. It did. Windows Update Rings and ManagePreviewBuilds This was surprising because we had fixed this issue back in the…
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How to Prevent the Run command on Windows 10 for Azure AD Joined and Intune managed devices

A customer recently asked how they could prevent their users from using the Run command. The run command is invoked by hitting Win+R, or going to Start - Windows System - Run (there are other ways, but these are the primary ones). The easy way to solve this is via Group Policy. In the GPO…
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Autopilotupdate Error Message During OOBE

If you are using Windows Autopilot and are using a custom image, you may run across an error that says Something Went Wrong with an error message that says Autopilotupdate (clearly not a very useful error). Resolution: When sysprepping an image, there's a registry key (HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Provisioning\AutopilotPolicy) that gets removed when sysprep generalizes the image. This…
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Using Autopilot Profiles offline in Windows 10

Scenario - Enroll existing, non-Autopilot enrolled devices to Azure AD and Intune (or 3rd party MDM). This is useful for devices that are currently used by a customer but not enrolled into Autopilot. The benefits are that the customer doesn't need to collect the Autopilot hardware information. This process will use an existing User Driven…
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How to Manage Shared Devices in Windows 10

In my previous post on Configuring Windows 10 Devices to Wake and Update Outside of Class Time I discussed how we can manage shared devices with Windows 10 and wake and update those devices leveraging the new Shared PC Configuration Service Provider (CSP). In this new video, I repeat some of the benefits and methods…
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Configuring Windows 10 Devices to Wake and Update Outside of Class time

Problem Today, many productivity hours are lost due to software updates installing during class time resulting in frustrated users. Customers that are leveraging traditional management solutions such as System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) or other 3rd party tools don't have an easy way of updating these devices outside of class time. Solutions such as Wake…
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How to Create a Silent, Self-Extracting Installer for use with Windows Configuration Designer

How to Create a Self-Extracting Installer using 7Zip for Complex Applications for use with Windows Configuration Designer A challenge that may arise when trying to use modern deployment techniques with Windows 10 is the need to deploy applications that have complex installation methods. These methods may use setup.exe's that call .msi files or have multiple…
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System Center 2012 Configuration Manager Beta 1 Unix and Linux Client Downloads Available

System Center 2012 Configuration Manager SP1 Beta 1 offers support for managing Unix and Linux clients (and Mac OS clients as well). When download loading the beta SP1 bits, the client bits aren't available and need to be downloaded separately. The following Unix and Linux versions are supported in Beta 1: AIX Version 7.1 (Power)…
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List of RSS Feeds for KB Articles for Microsoft Products

Want to keep up with the latest KB articles for the Microsoft products that you have in your environment? The best solution I've found is to use an RSS Feed Reader and subscribe to the feeds. Here's a list of all of the RSS feeds for every KB article that comes out. http://support.microsoft.com/select/?target=rss

SoftwareUpdateAutomation.exe Scheduled Task Fails with an 0x1 Error Message When Updating FEP 2010 Definition Package

Issue When using the SoftwareUpdateAutomation.exe file as a scheduled task to update the Forefront Endpoint Protection definition files, the scheduled task may fail with an error code of 0x1. In the %programdata%\SoftwareUpdateAutomation.log file may see the following error: SQLMessage = "[22018][245][Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][SQL Server]Conversion failed when converting the varchar value 'APSB10-22' to data type…
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