21 May
The sixth Annual Midwest Management Summit (MMS) wrapped up earlier this month at the Radisson Blu of Mall of America in Minneapolis, Minnesota. For longtime folks in the industry, this conference was a replacement for the Microsoft Management Summit that used to be held annually in Las Vegas until its demise through consolidation into TechEd Read more…
13 Apr
Over the past several years we have seen a clear trend towards mobility. Our clients want secure and consistent access to their documents and applications from any device or location. Such a deployment has become more accessible with the maturation of deployment technology. Advances in administration, monitoring and alerting, and maintenance have also made it Read more…
11 Jan
The 1612 tech preview was recently released and I thought I would take a look and highlight a couple of the new features coming to Current Branch in the near term. Installer Handling The first item to catch my eye was the ability to “Block installation of an application if specified executables are running.” (Click images Read more…
13 Sep
SCCM Health Checkups System Center Configuration Manager is much like today’s cars. I don’t work on my car much anymore. It is so computerized and complicated that I prefer to hand it over to professionals. Likewise, SCCM is becoming increasingly complicated under the hood and it seems like more is added every month. Just like your automobile, your SCCM Read more…
27 Jul
Back in May, Microsoft released KB3159706 to resolve an issue with a previous KB that broke WSUS. Unfortunately, KB3159706 also breaks WSUS. You can prevent this by performing some manual steps after it is installed. We have repeatedly seen WSUS service crashes labeled Event 7031 with the error “The WSUS Service service terminated unexpectedly. It has Read more…
25 May
As part of troubleshooting an issue recently with the WSUS role on an SCCM server, I encountered an issue I’d never heard of before where a recent Windows Update broke the WSUS role on a server. The symptom of this was that I couldn’t connect to the WSUS server through the MMC and I saw a Read more…
13 May
When deploying new desktops, especially Windows 10, some decisions come easily while others turn into elephants in the room. The easy decisions: deployment method, OS version, Office version, hardware models. The challenge experienced by many firms is deciding on applications, especially if desktop refreshes have long intervals between them. If the desktop was deployed two or more years ago, Read more…
27 Apr
MBAM (Microsoft Bitlocker Administration and Monitoring) is a fantastic tool for managing your Bitlocker Recovery Keys and your TPM Passwords. There is, however, an issue when using MBAM to manage these items if you are using Bitlocker Pre-Provisioning during Operating System Deployment (OSD). The issue stems from the Pre-Provisioning taking ownership of the TPM chip and not Read more…
22 Mar
Microsoft’s User State Migration Toolkit (USMT) is a fantastic free tool. It can, however, be a little daunting when you first start trying to use it. It’s relatively easy to run the migration manually, but once you start adding it into an MDT/SCCM Task Sequence it gets quite a bit more complicated. I first ran into Read more…