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.