January 13, 2013
The MDT Wizard Editor is probably one of the most useful tool if it comes to editing the Lite Touch Wizard files. It especially simplifies the pretty tedious part of editing the xml files and the embedded HTML content of each wizard pane. However the current version of it dates back to October 2009 and with this didn’t support any of the changes, that came with MDT 2012 and MDT 2012 Update 1. One of the major changes between 2010 and 2012 has been, that in contrast to MDT 2010, all wizard panes are...
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Filed under: MDT, MDT 2012
October 01, 2012
Just received the following email: Dear Maik Koster, Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2012 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in Setup & Deployment technical communities during the past year. Thanks to Microsoft for re-awarding me. I really appreciate being part of this community that gives so much...
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Filed under: MVP
September 28, 2012
Despite all discovery methods, Health scripts and other cleanup efforts it might be helpful from time to time to simply compare all the computer account objects that we have in Active Directory with our resources in ConfigMgr. There are a couple posts available, that demonstrate how to integrate information from Active Directory into SQL reports. See e.g. “ How to add AD data to ConfigMgr reporting ” from Garth Jones. As you can see, in his post, Garth shows already how to compare AD accounts with...
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Filed under: Custom Scripts, Active Directory, Database, ConfigMgr
August 23, 2012
As you might know, there is a whole bunch of settings/properties in MDT that drive the processing of MDT. And with every new version of MDT, the amount of settings typically just grows, but sometimes, they also drop the usage of some of them. Most of these settings are also available in the Database, that comes with MDT, and most of the new settings will also be published to the database, as soon as you upgrade it. However, sometimes, they also get rid of deprecated ones and you typically...
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Filed under: MDT, Database
August 21, 2012
In my post MDT Monitoring Deep Dive II – Consuming the data yourself , I showed you how you can write your own web service, that consumes the MDT monitoring information. The next thing we will cover is, how we can send even more information from MDT and also make use of a pretty hidden feature in this monitoring option I blogged about in the last post . Send additional information As we have seen in the last couple of posts, MDT will automatically send some information about the current deployment...
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Filed under: MDT, MDT 2012, Monitoring
August 21, 2012
If you enable the MDT Monitoring, you also enable kind of a “hidden” feature, that will give you just another way of setting properties on computers that are being deployed. One of the most important tasks in MDT is the gather process. It collects information locally on the client computer like hardware info etc. It evaluates the rules configured in the customsettings.ini and can also query databases and web services or run additional scripts for this evaluation. Now, since MDT 2012, if you enabled...
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Filed under: MDT, MDT 2012, Monitoring
July 26, 2012
As you are well aware, JavaScript is, what drives our current online world, make it more dynamic then ever. In opposite to this, VBScript is, what drives almost everything in MDT, giving us full flexibility in our deployments, no matter which version of Windows we are using it on. But what most aren’t aware of is, that those languages easily talk to each other. “ Why would I care?” you might ask. Well, let’s think about the MDT Wizard or hta FrontEnds in general. Pretty often you write them based...
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Filed under: Boot Wizard, MDT, hta, vbscript, Development, JavaScript, jQuery
July 25, 2012
As mentioned in my last post , MDT 2012 comes with an interesting monitoring option. It installs a web service, where events are being posted to and which the workbench queries to get the current status of all running and recently finished deployments. But as we also got aware, it’s posting a lot more information as visible in the workbench. So if you would like to see all the stuff that’s going on there and would like to do some more advanced processing/reporting on this stuff, you are reading the...
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July 16, 2012
The new monitoring feature is probably one of the most interesting and underestimated features of MDT 2012. In this version, its just some “initial” implementation, but it has great potential and in contrast to other custom extensions that have been available before, it’s tightly integrated and working out-of-the-box with support from Microsoft. What I won’t cover in this post is how to set it up and troubleshoot. As there has been some great posts already that cover all this in every detail. Please...
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Filed under: MDT, MDT 2012, Monitoring
July 11, 2012
Sometimes it would be nice to be able to download some files from the internet or intranet during deployments. Maybe to get some updated tools like bginfo.exe or store some configuration or wizard files outside of your boot image etc. This is quite easy to achieve for files that are located on a network share, as MDT has some built-in support for this since quite some time already and I’ve recently blogged about the available functions for File-handling (see Extending the MDT Documentation - Some...
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Filed under: Custom Scripts, MDT, vbscript, MDT 2012
July 05, 2012
A common question if it comes to deployments is, how to add a computer (or user) to one or several Active Directory groups. As you probably know, I generally prefer using web services for any Active Directory related task, as this avoids a lot of typical issues like permission problems, adding ADSI to the WinPE etc. Luckily the Deployment Web Service , which is freely available on CodePlex , has some appropriate functions that allow us to fulfill this task. Adding a computer (or user) to a single...
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Filed under: Custom Scripts, Webservice, Active Directory, MDT, MDT 2012
June 25, 2012
Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 come with a new feature called “Offline Domain Join”. With this, you get the possibility to join a computer or member server to the domain, even if that computer/server currently isn’t connected to the domain. Why would I need that, you might ask. Well, think about remote workers or remote technicians, that might only have a VPN connection to your network. Or you have (or are) an external company (OEM, etc.), preparing the new computers at a remote location and...
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Filed under: Custom Scripts, Microsoft Deployment, Active Directory, MDT, vbscript
June 24, 2012
The Microsoft Deployment Toolkit comes with a pretty extensive and almost complete documentation, which is even more remarkable, as it’s a free tool. But even this almost complete documentation, it’s lacking some information that might be helpful for some of you. I’ll start with two things that are available in the ZTIGather.vbs. Why should you care? Well, ZTIGather.vbs is more or less THE core script, that is referenced by almost any other scripts. It holds all the publicly available classes for...
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Filed under: Custom Scripts, MDT, vbscript, MDT 2012
June 18, 2012
There are a couple things, that are quite common in most deployments. Very often you need to delete a couple files, copy some folders, remove or update some registry keys, maybe update a XML or INI file etc. What a lot of people typically do is to write some kind of cleanup-script that runs at the end of their task sequence and removes unnecessary shortcuts, updates the registry to disable some auto-update features or whatever. Group Policy Preferences or Group Policies would probably often be a...
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Filed under: Custom Scripts, MDT, vbscript, ConfigMgr, XML
June 05, 2012
Today I had an interesting question. Someone wanted to be able to see all the PnP IDs of the imported drivers so he could easily check if a specific device was already supported. While this information is available in the properties of each driver, its not shown in a column of the workbench. And even if it would be available as a column, it wouldn’t be easy to read as a single driver typically supports a whole bunch of PNP IDs. Now as everything in MDT is available via PowerShell, it should be possible...
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Filed under: MDT, Powershell
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