Join me at Microsoft Tech Summit on February 21 – 22 in Frankfurt, Germany, where experts from around the world present discussion panels, ask-the-experts sessions and breakout sessions and cover the latest in Azure and Microsoft 365 at a free, technical learning event for IT professionals and developers. The conference will be held at Messe Frankfurt. If you aren’t familiar with it, the Messe Frankfurt is a great venue in a fantastic city that is located in the heart of Europe and entire Germany’s road network convenes here, along with the largest German airport and train station connected to the venue. The Messe Frankfurt enjoys a central location, hotels and shopping areas are close.

After a few weeks off, I am delighted to announce that I have returned full time, once again delivering somewhat IT related blog posts, while neatly segueing in thirty-six thousand links to older articles at the same time, in the hope of gaining a few more hits for the internet's least widely-read IT blog.

As my regular blog readers will be aware (yes, all three of you), there is something increasingly traditional about me writing about my customer engagements and today should be no different. With the new way of building, deploying, and servicing OS introduced with Windows 10 (Windows as a Service a.k.a. Hustle as a Service) I often kick off customer engagements with a workshop for IT professionals addressing biggest benefits of adopting Windows 10 and detailing comprehensive set of intelligent security solutions which allow organizations to protect against security threats and to better protect user and company data against sophisticated attacks thus allowing them to align themselves with the GDPR requirements. By outlining these benefits heads on, I can often persuade my customers to adopt a comprehensive set of advanced security capabilities including, but not limited to Credential Guard, Windows Information Protection, Windows Defender ATP and BitLocker.

A key part of any complete end-to-end deployment project is analysis of the resulting logs to identify root causes for hiccups you may run into during your deployment process. This is part of the new "data driven" mentality because operating system deployment (OSD) is highly complex and contains many moving parts. You can save yourself a lot of time and energy if you know where to look for answers. I can’t stress enough how invaluable log files can be in tracking down deployment issues!

A few days ago I stumbled upon a question on the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) forum where a user asked for guidance on how to install support for additional keyboard layouts using MDT. This post explains how you can add additional keyboards in Windows during OSD.

Yesterday I came across a Twitter thread in which multiple users detailed their beef with the revamped setup experience of Windows 10 (aka the OOBE). The OOBE was introduced with Windows 10 "Creators Update" (1703): Cortana voice walks the user through the OOBE experience, enabling the user to complete parts of OOBE by responding to spoken prompts. Windows 10 installations using following languages are affected: en-US, es-MX, ja-JP, en-GB, fr-FR, it-IT, de-DE, es-ES, fr-CA, en-CA, en-AU, pt-BR, zh-CN. Exacerbating the issue, Cortana's voice prompts are loud and proud by default and can become quickly irritating when attempting to install multiple machines at the same time. There’s little clear help for fixing it, so in this post, I’ll give you easy steps you can follow to tape up Cortana's cake-hole.

Automated OS deployment became common as IT professionals install systems using tools like Microsoft Deployment Toolkit or System Center Configuration Manager. In most cases, deploying Windows OS is fairly straightforward if you follow established best practices. However, there are still issues out there that may catch you off guard and you will suffer the consequences of task sequences misbehaving.

These days most of my blog posts start off with a question from a customer. At least, this time around the question was relatively simple: How do you sideload a modern application into Windows 10? If you have followed Windows 10 development closely, then you have probably heard that Microsoft Deployment Toolkit has the ability to sideload apps, assuming you have the necessary source files handy. But what if you are using a third-party tool to deploy applications?

Quite a few of my blog posts start off with a customer engagement - this one is no different. This week I am implementing a LoginVSI Automation Machine powered RDS infrastructure at a large automotive company. This process involves packaging quite a few applications including Dell Active Roles 7.1 MMC Interface, a single, intuitive tool designed for comprehensive privileged account management in Active Directory and Azure Active Directory. Packaging Dell Active Roles console is *SUPER* easy with Login VSI Automation Machine because it comes in an MSI package, so all you need to do is simply importing the MSI file into the media repository, creating the corresponding package and adding Install MSI action item. However, when opening the Dell Active Roles 7.1 console, the following error reared its ugly head: "MMC could not create the snap-in. The snap-in might not have been installed correctly.", followed by "CLSID: {D50F5BB7-337F-4A59-8797-BDA0B7DC1DF0}".

The other day, as I was working with a customer on improving and optimizing his Windows 10 image, one of IT technicians asked if it would be possible to import a wireless network profile to devices during the OS deployment without resorting to Group Policies (I am sure they had good reasons). By deploying these settings, the customer hoped to minimize the effort that end users require to connect to the corporate wireless network.