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Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) for newbies - Part 5

Fri, 18 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In our final part, we want to create the offline media to use to reimage our physical machines.

App-V And Windows 10 - Making Sense Of It All

Wed, 19 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

In the last SCCM Test Lab post, we looked at part 4, where we had done the basic setup, and were looking to go further into part 5.

Things have moved on since then. Microsoft has now officially released Windows Server 2016 and SCCM 2016. Windows 10 1607 was also released, with some interesting aspects about App-V and UE-V.

My focus for the last 2 months had been to plan for how we could in our organization have coexisting operating systems (Windows 7 and Windows 10) when the App-V solution was different for Windows 10 1607.

In this post I’ll be sharing some of the things I have discovered, and how you can try to make sense of all the confusion which might be out there.

SETTING UP A VIRTUAL SCCM TESTLAB – PART 5

Wed, 19 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

In the last 4 parts, we looked at of setting up a SCCM test lab and have now deployed our first application.

In this post, we will look at how the deployed application looks on the client side and install this new application.

This post was delayed as I was looking into SCCM 2016 and investigating the upgrade paths

Visio Viewer 2016 Not Working On Windows 7

Wed, 27 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I have been troubleshooting an issue I had with Visio Viewer 2016 on Windows 7. The application appears to install just fine, all Visio drawing files appears with the correct icons and is now associated with Internet Explorer. But once you open the file, the plugin or viewer does not load in Internet Explorer.

Note : This was tested on Windows 7, but it applies to Windows Server 2008 R2 as well. It is in fact where I first encountered the error

PowerShell App Deployment Toolkit - Deep Dive

Fri, 08 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

When we last looked at the PowerShell App Deployment Toolkit, we looked at a simple example of installing Visual C++ Runtime, which does not show the power of using the toolkit. In this post, we want to look at a more complete example of using the toolkit to save time and effort creating deployment scripts.

Toolkit Configuration

But first, we want to look into some of the configuration options of the toolkit. The toolkit folder has a file called AppDeployToolkitConfig.xml. This contains all the default configurations which will be used for all deployments.

SETTING UP A VIRTUAL SCCM TESTLAB – PART 4

Thu, 30 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post picks up after part 1, part 2 and part 3. I suggest you read all 3 parts first to understand what is happening here in part 4.

In this part 4, we will setup the SCCM discovery methods, boundaries, boundary groups, SCCM roles, and push the SCCM Client to our client machine.

Lets get started

PowerShell App Deployment Toolkit

Fri, 22 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

In my line of work, knowledge of how installations work is crucial. And with that knowledge, comes experience making terrible vendor installations work properly in an enterprise environment. For years, the standard solution, when troubleshooting and experimenting was going nowhere, was to repackage the troublesome app. Where experimenting lead somewhere, there might have been an eventual VB script written to cater for all the complexities involved to get everything working properly.

Some of the common challenges were

Show a nice interface to let users know something was happening, for silent installs
Install admin (system context) and user level files or registry keys, from the same script.
Return proper error codes back to the deployment system (commonly SCCM)
Link together several installations
Switch between install types (interactive, passive or silent; pulled install, task sequence, server install, etc)

These were common problems, and in some cases, you had to make several installation scripts, to cater for different scenarios. Ok, if you had enough time, you could create a script that accepted certain parameters on launch, to do different things. But in the rush to meet SLAs, you would do the most urgent thing first, and then go back to revisit the app later, when a different scenario was needed.

Which is why I was happy to find the PowerShell App Deployment Toolkit, as a common deployment toolkit to help with the common packaging and deployment issues.