Windows 7 Deployment Training Part 4-7

As I told you in the earlier post Jay Paloma has done some good Windows 7 Deployment Videos and you can find them published on YouTube here.

Part 4 – Use MDT to Acquire WIM Image

Part 5- Importing WIM into MDT and Deploying

Part 6 – Deploying via MDT Media

Part 7 – Deploying MDT via Network Share

Windows 7 Deployment Training Part 1-3

Jay Paloma has dome some great YouTube videos , these videos will get you up to speed with Windows 7 Deployment.

Part 1 – Generate WinPE Boot CD

Part 2 – Use WAIK to Acquire WIM Image

Part 3 – Using WAIK to Apply WIM Image

ConfigMgr – Online Training (rampup)

If you havent seen it Microsoft has released a rampupo web to accelerate your Configuration Manager learning

These areas are covered.

• Operating System Deployment
• Software Distribution
• Software Updates
• Asset Intelligence
• Client Health
• SQL Reporting Services
• Desired Configuration Management
• Internet Based Clients
• Network Access Protection
• Security and Compliance

The url to the website follows here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/systemcenter/cm/ff597934.aspx

Best of MMS – Sweden

I am glad that we will be having a best of MMS in Sweden, specially with the ash cloud and other things that disturbed the Swedish Attendance this year.   So if you live in Sweden and would like to attend this event you can sign up for it here.   In Collaboration with: SCUG.SE

“Whitby” Beta 1

Have you missed “Whitby” ? Its a cool web based app for searching Config Mgr Content. It might come in handy for you so go have alook at it.

http://cloudsearch.cloudapp.net/

Config Mgr Documentation Update

For thoose of you who have missed it a new update to the Config Mgr documentation has been released. You will find it here.

Source: http://blogs.technet.com/configurationmgr/archive/2010/03/25/the-configuration-manager-documentation-library-has-been-updated-for-march-2010.aspx

Block Browser Choice

So whats this thing about Broswer Choice to start with ? Well you can read more about it here.

So if you would like to block this behaviour like most enterprise organisations want to do. There is a way to block that this updates comes into play. You simply just need to add a registry value to your machines. If the registry key is present the users will not experience the Browser Choice experience on that machine.

Registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESoftwareBrowserChoice
Value Name: Enabled
Value Type: DWORD
Possible Values: 1 Display browser choice update
                                0 Do not display browser choice update

There are different ways of adding it , choose the method that suites your environment best.If you just want to test it on your own machine simply run this command , and verify that the reg value is there.

Using lastLogontimeStamp for your Client Health

If you want to use the lastLogontimeStamp value in Config Mgr reports its fully possible. The value will give you a date when your machine last was in contact with your Active Directory with some modifications, In fact the date will be between 9-14 days behind the actual date with default settings. But at least it gives you a hint on your clients activity. More about the value here: http://blogs.technet.com/askds/archive/2009/04/15/the-lastlogontimestamp-attribute-what-it-was-designed-for-and-how-it-works.aspx .

So first you need to collect the value this is possible to do with your system discovery task. All we need to to is to configure an extra attribute to be collected “lastLogontimeStamp”.

Go to your discovery task and the Active Directory Attribute and add a new value lastLogontimeStamp, and press ok and at the next discovery the value will be collected.

The Value itself is is stored in INT8 se we need to convert the value to Date and Time when we Display it. My SQL Skills are note the best in the world so I asked my friend John to help me out and so he did. So for further references please read the blog post he wrote about it.

In my case I am on SQL 2008 so I  did my function and used it in my query to get the machine name and the lastLogontimeStamp in my Report.

Function to Convert Int8 to Date Time

go

CREATE FUNCTION dbo.udf_Int8_to_DateTime(
   @Int8 BIGINT
)
RETURNS DATETIME2
AS
   BEGIN
      RETURN (DATEADD(mi,@Int8 / 600000000 + DATEDIFF(Minute,GetUTCDate(),GetDate()),CAST(’1/1/1601′ AS DATETIME2)))
   END
GO

SQL Report to get Machine Name, Usaername and Last AD Contact using the function created in the previous step.

SELECT     v_R_System.Name0, v_R_System.User_Name0, CAST(dbo.udf_Int8_to_DateTime(v_R_System.LastLogonTimeStamp0) as varchar(11)) as LastADContact
FROM      v_R_System
ORDER BY LastADContact asc

This has been tested on SQL 2008, but you should always test on lab systems before moving any code to production.  This is released “AS IS” and confers no rights.

References

• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms676824(VS.85).aspx
• http://blogs.technet.com/askds/archive/2009/04/15/the-lastlogontimestamp-attribute-what-it-was-designed-for-and-how-it-works.aspx 
• http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/jnelson/archive/2009/08/25/140938.aspx