Windows Power Essentials Tips & Tricks
January 10, 2020 1 Comment
Do you own a large oaf like feline? Has it just sauntered on to your laptop and decided to sleep on the keyboard, despite you being midway through typing something? Then you may be suffering from a case of AnoyingOaflikeCat-itis.
May 15, 2019 5 Comments
Just a quick post, hit this today with a USB pen drive i keep some deployment tools on. If you are trying to install Office 365 desktop software and you see this message:
Don’t waste any time trying to find any remnance of a previous Office installation, chances are it is not there!
Download the latest version of the Office Deployment Tool, and while you;re at it head over to the Office Customisation Tool for help with those XML configuration files.
September 6, 2018 25 Comments
With the release of Server 2019 Essentials, the end of an era has been reached. Gone are the wizards and tools designed for the small business owner.
Gone is the Remote Web Access feature.
Gone is the Essentials Connector.
Gone is Client PC Backup.
Gone is Office 365 Integration.
Gone, is the Dashboard.
Gone, indeed, is the Essentials Role.
All that remains of Essentials, is the name Essentials and the licensing limits of the Essentials SKU, of 25 client access licenses.
What we are presented with, is now more in line with Windows foundation server from several years ago.
July 5, 2018 5 Comments
Regular readers will be aware of a script I wrote some time ago to remind people to change their password, sending them an email when it was due to be changed. I wanted to extend this up to Office 365 but at the time, when I checked it out the relevant data was not exposed by using the Get-MSOLPasswordPolicy cmdlet. Or so I thought.
Whilst chatting with co-conspirator Tim Barrett yesterday he sent me a link to Spice Works where someone named bbeckers had indeed published a modified version of my original script that was talking to Office 365, and, to my surprise was dated back in 2016.
Of course I wanted to try it out, but on my production tenant, the information returned from Get-MSOLPasswordPolicy was an error saying ‘You do not have permission to call this cmdlet’
July 4, 2018 16 Comments
I noticed this thread in the forum a while ago, and setup a Lab network to reproduce it. Sure enough after a few days, my local machine certificate store is full of duplicated certificates.
The issue only seems to affect Essentials 2016 and only if you are using the free remotewebaccess.com certificates.
The issue is also discussed here on the MCB Systems blog.
Unfortunately for me work took over and i was not able to spend any more time on it, and with responses from Microsoft for any Essentials related issue being, shall we say, pedestrian, i wont be holding out any hope of a fix soon.
June 28, 2018 2 Comments
Just recently i decided to rebuild my lab setup, which sits on a physical server in my office.
Unfortunately after painstakingly moving VHDs around my system to adjust disk space and rebuild arrays, i managed to format the wrong disk and lost it all! Being a lab setup i had not backed any of it up either.
Not the end of the world of course, more annoyed with myself than worried about the test VMs i lost.
Anyway, i noticed a thread in the TechNet forum (at least two actually) mentioning slow network performance with WIndows 10 after the latest update, and that removing the Essentials connector would remedy it.
So i set about building a Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials VM and a Windows 10 client. When trying to launch the connector I received this error:
March 8, 2018 2 Comments
I wrote a series of guides about basic configuration of MDT and how you could customise the Start Menu, and with some further trickery, the Taskbar. I was never particularly happy with that section as it involved using a script to edit the registry after a user had logged in for the first time. Which, when talking about automation or consistency leaves a bit to be desired.
Recently I have fielded a few support calls where Windows 10 users have received a new device and started using Windows Mail, instead of Outlook even though that was installed and configured on their machines. The problem here is that Windows Mail is on the taskbar by default, as well as being on the Start Menu with a nice live tile saying ‘use me for your email’.
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