An area of current difficulty with technology management is the inability to rely on particular versions of Dot Net being uniformly available across the enterprise. I’ve used Dot Net for the standardisation of software packages as it allows for standardised interfaces with software management to occur.
For many years the “OEM” folder has been a method for copying files to the local hard drive of a machine while it was being built.
The idea was simply that anything in a particular folder would be copied to a specific drive during the Windows installation process.
The $OEM$ folder method is no longer available to modern Windows deployments. The next best thing is a replacement process using MDT.
Modern UI (Windows 8) applications differ fundamentally from widows explorer initiated applications prior to the Start Screen because we are initiating the “shell” of explorer with a shortcut instead of directly calling an executable.
As Orchestrator is guaranteed to grow in importance for most Microsoft based organisations, the need to query the Configuration Manager database becomes more important as well.
Attempts to build Windows 8.1 Update 1 on a VMWare ESX host produces the error “Your PC ran into a problem that it couldn’t handle, and now it needs to restart.” HAL INITIALIZATION FAILED.
A common frustration with restricted staff members is the default behaviour of Internet Explorer to use Bing instead of Google.
Google held over 88% of the search engine market share in January 2014 which is no doubt, a reason why Microsoft have traditionally make it difficult to change the IE default search provider from Bing.
On a recent project I worked within, Windows 8.1 workstations required the ability to install a freeware Store application although the network restrictions limited access to the internet.
The importing of CAB files that were created by the Microsoft Security Compliance Manager as SCCM’s Desired Configuration Management Items can fail with the non-descript error “The cab file references missing content or contains a circular reference”.
A single SCCM 2012 R2 system may be segmented for use by different teams by creating security scopes. This is extremely useful for delegating full rights to project and test teams without risking the deployment of development artefacts to production environments.
The Integration Pack for System Center 2012 Configuration Manager, distributed via Orchestrator, causes the loading of the SCCM admin console to crash on servers that have been distributed to.
Error specifics of the Admin Console crash are: