Windows 10 Migration Status Spreadsheet

I’ve created this spreadsheet and use it to track our progress week by week of our Windows 7 to Windows 10 migration project.  Now that end of support for Windows 7 is under a year away I thought I’d share it for anyone who might find it useful.

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MiSCUG – Using Power BI to Report OS Deployment Stats

On 11 January 2019 I had the privilege to speak at the Michigan System Center Users Group meeting on the topic of using Power BI to report your OSD build stats.  This is a companion post to that presentation.

This is an update to my original post ( here ) on how to gather and present statistics on your build sequences.  I’ve taken what I’ve learned since that original post and have expanded the process to handle not only an OSD “build” but also a WaaS CompatScan or In-Place Upgrade, or any other Task Sequence.

Nested Task Sequence Mapper

I’ve been looking for a simple way to identify and map out the nested task sequences.  This is the first part of a project that I’m working on.  The goal of the overall project is to duplicate an entire task sequence “suite” of the parent and all nested sequences, and then update all the nested references.

Automating Windows 10 Servicing

[6-Jul-2018: Updated Script to v 1.2 – New .NET 3.5.1 install command (per Mike Horton @mikeh36)]

After attending MMS one of the items that I put on my “Post-MMS To Do” list was to patch my OS Upgrade package source the proper way.  I don’t want to do it manually, nobody does, so I set out to learn exactly how to do it right and script it.

That where Mike Terrill and Johan Arwidmark come in.

So your boss is going to want stats for your OSD sequence? [Part 2 – Reporting with Excel]

How to provide hard statistics on your build sequences.

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In Part 1 I went into how I collected the data that would be used to report on the 2 goals my boss set out for our OS deployment; 1) a 90% success rate and 2) 60 minute build times.

So your boss is going to want stats for your OSD sequence? [Part 1 – Data Gathering]

How to provide hard statistics on your build sequences.

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A while back my boss gave me two goals for our OS deployments; 1) he set a target for 90% successful builds and 2) build times as close to 1 hour as possible.  Okay, getting there is one thing, but how do I report on that?

Enabling BranchCache with Configuration Manager

Last week I wrote a post about setting up Windows PE Peer Caching.  One of the limitations of that feature is that it only works within the Windows PE portion of a build task sequence.  Once in the full OS or for deployments to established clients Peer Caching is unavailable.

Phil Wilcock, co-founder of 2Pint Software, commented and pointed out that you could use Peer Caching for getting the OS deployed and then use BranchCache within the full OS.

Now, I’ll be honest here.  I understand the “textbook” when it comes to BranchCache but I had never actually set it up.  It always seemed to fall under the, “One day I’m going to have to give that a try.”  Well that day is today.  This post will get BranchCache working with Configuration Manager.  Once that is done my next step will be getting 2Pint’s BranchCache for OSD up and running.

“Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.”

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Creating Your Own Personal Hydration Solution: Introduction

Setting up a lab can be a pretty time consuming project.  A number of people, myself included, have created various hydration kits in an attempt to make it easier.  One thing that they many have in common is that they use the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) to generate a large build ISO to be used for building each virtual machine.

Using an MDT build ISO has both advantages and disadvantages.  It is portable.  It is simple. But it takes massive amounts of disk space and changes are very time consuming.

Sunday Project: Upgrade Hard Drive for Windows 10

“It’s been a long time…”

– Jimmy Page [Led Zeppelin]

It’s been too long since my last post.

Well, my wife’s laptop started getting the popup to reserve her copy of Windows 10 so I thought I’d spend a Sunday doing the upgrade.  The problem was that the hard drive in her laptop was just about full.  The laptop was a few years old and the drive (120GB) which might have been enough when it was new just wasn’t making the cut lately.

To be honest with her birthday coming up next month it’s about time to get her a new laptop.

Anyway, I needed to replace the original hard drive with a larger one so I could 1) complete the Windows 10 upgrade and 2) giver her some breathing room for a while.

The upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10 is pretty straight forward and well documented so I’m not going to focus on that.  Instead I’m focused on the process of cloning her hard drive to the bigger drive.

PowerShell – Archive all Task Sequences to XML with Index

We’ve amassed a very large number of task sequences since migrating to Configuration Manager 2012 and it got me thinking about ways to archive off older sequences so that we can clean house.  So I came up with this script.

The script will first collect all of the task sequences in your site.  Next it will enumerate through them, write the sequence to an XML named after the task sequence ID and finally create a CSV index of the TSID, task sequence name, the last modified date of the sequence and when the sequence was backed up.