The development of the Spring Creators Update (codenamed "Redstone 4") is now heading towards the finishing line. We can assume that Windows 10 1803 is now feature-complete and as such, I can't stress it highly enough that you should start testing the newest features and functionality in this Semi-Annual Channel release as soon as possible in preparation for broad deployment to the devices in your organization. As part of this process, you should take a look at provisioned apps - most likely you want to ensure that only a choice selection of apps is being installed, whenever a user logs on either for the first time or after installing a feature update on a Windows 10 computer, because app installation directly impacts login times.

While I sometimes long for the day when I no longer have to deal with unexpected Windows 10 behavior, there’s something rewarding about quickly finding a solution. In the process, I often end up with an idea for a blog post I can share with thousands three regular readers. Yesterday I successfully solved an interesting case that opened when a customer contacted me a month ago and reported that the Photo app was no longer working on their 1709 reference image.

As Windows 10 Redstone 4 Update (1803) development winds down, it’s the grandiose time to examine updated and new Group Policy settings. There is (obviously) no official documentation from the Group Policy team at this point and there might be quite a few changes to Group Policy settings before Windows 10 Spring Update hits RTM. Still, it can't hurt to poke around current ADMX files because there are truly several things duller in our line of work than comparing thousands of lines of text. Right?

There are many reasons why an organization would spend a lot of time on image creation and maintenance. Often, it’s due to the lack of a standardized image engineering methodology. Whatever the cause, the experience of manually creating Windows images quickly deteriorates and becomes a time-consuming and difficult to manage organizational nightmare. However, using free Microsoft deployment tools and PowerShell you can greatly simplify the task of building and maintaining Windows images.

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.