Category Archives: Misc

TimmyIT 10:00 am on October 2, 2017  

ConfigMgr related videos from Microsoft Ignite 2017

 

Ignite 2017 is now over for this time and Microsoft have already announced that they will come back to Orlando next year for Ignite 2018. Until next year we have hours upon hours of interresting videoes to watch and in this blog post I will highlight some of the talks that covered ConfigMgr related topics but also other videos that covered modern management and management in generall since they are often highly relevant if you are a ConfigMgr administrator.

 

You can find all the videos over at

https://myignite.microsoft.com/videos

or over at their yourtube channel

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrhJmfAGQ5K81XQ8_od1iTg

 

 

Microsoft 365: Modern management and deployment

 

What’s new in Configuration Manager

 

 

 

Dig deeply into BranchCache: Learning from the experts

BranchCache is a Peer-to-Peer solution that comes with ConfigMgr which aims to help out with content distribution. One of the biggest challanges enterprises are facing is bandwith and size of data that needs to be transfered over the network so its important to know when and how P2P can help out with content distribution.

 

 

 

How to design and complete your successful move to Windows 10 and WaaS

 

 

Learn how to service Windows 10 using Windows Update for Business

 

Secure Windows 10 with Intune, Azure AD and System Center Configuration Manager

 

 

 

Conduct a successful pilot deployment of Microsoft Intune

 

 

 

This is just a small sample of all the talks and I highly recommend you head over to https://myignite.microsoft.com/videos or to https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrhJmfAGQ5K81XQ8_od1iTg

 

That’s all for now and until next time, cheers !

Don’t forget to follow me on twitter

 

And you can also find me blogging over at http://blog.ctglobalservices.com/

TimmyIT 10:00 am on November 3, 2016  

Book review – So good they can’t ignore you by Cal Newport

So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

 

 

 

Do you wanna work with what you love or follow your passion? Do you want to have a great career and make a lot of money? Well, then you need to be good at something first and here’s why:

 

The short of this book is to show case how to get the perfect job without the mindset of I will focus on whats my passion “Passion Mindset” because it could be your own demise or at least be somewhat problematic. Cal wants to highlight an possible solution that first get really good at something and specialize in that field with the “Craftman mindset” and with that you gain what he calls “Career capital” when you reach that point when you are “So good they can’t ignore you” you trade in your career capital for work you love and that takes you closer to the perfect job. Whats your perfect job? well that depends, it could be doing something specific or making X amount of money or whatever goal you have and he  goes through the different steps you need to take to reach your goal.

I believe he’s on to something even tho it’s not rocket science i think people today tend to overlook this. For example when someone say that “you can be anything you want” tho I don’t think that’s untrue you also need to ask yourself the question “what can I give to the world?” instead of “what can the world give to me?” Because no one will give you your dream job or a raise just out of the kindness of their heart. From my own experience new opportunities have opened for me when i reached a point of being “So good they can’t ignore you” (Tho in this book, Cal talks about people who did things on a bigger scale I also believe that it applies to smaller things) no matter what it was and this it self doesn’t mean that you are the number 1 in the world at something but that you just are good at what you do.

I’m not close to my own goal but when  look back at my career in IT and the journey I’m on with my own personal development and how being good at my job directly correlate, all the opportunities I’ve got so far comes from I hard work and doing a good job. At the same time when you are really good at something you will start enjoying it even more.

 

It’s a great read but as with a lot of other things in life you need to be able to read between the lines, don’t take all the things literally and some of he’s examples and explanations are somewhat longer then i wanted them to be (I’ll be like come on get to the point already!). Thankfully I’m an Audible junkie who listens to it at 2x or 3x speed which saves me time.

So who is this book for, I would say anyone who has a goal in mind with what your perfect job would be and for anyone interested in developing their own career. This book will give you some good insight on how to make that a possibility.

 

You can find the book over at amazon

So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

and if you want to know more about Cal Newport you can find him at

http://calnewport.com/

 

You can find me over at

 

Cheers Timmy

 

 

 

 

TimmyIT 11:05 pm on October 27, 2016  

Event – SCUG.SE Enterprise client day Oct 2016

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On the 27th of October, System Center user group Sweden (www.scug.se) organized a day filled with great speakers with the focus on Clients. The day before they also had an event but with focus on Cloud and Datacenter with MVP speakers like Mikael Nyström, Stefan Schörling, Markus Lassfolk and more. I wasn’t able to join on the 26th because i was in London at the time and since i wasn’t there i can’t really talk about how it was on the Cloud and Datacenter day but I’m betting it was as awesome the Enterprise Client day 😉

 

The event was held at Microsoft’s Kista office in Stockholm, Sweden.  at 08:00 MS opened there doors and registration began for all the attendees.
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The day started out with Stefan Schörling and Jörgen Nilsson greeted everyone welcome, I’m not sure how many there attendees there were but my guess would be around 30-40 people in total.

After the introduction a short discussion about the new Windows update patch model was brought up and the importance of starting to test it out asap since that model will be applied for more products then just Windows 7 in the near future. If you aren’t aware of the new patch model with cumulative updates  you can find more info about it over at

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/windowsitpro/2016/08/15/further-simplifying-servicing-model-for-windows-7-and-windows-8-1/

 

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Next up was one of the Sponsors Shavlik. Guido talked about 3rd party Patch Management and there and their plugin to ConfigMgr that will help you deploy 3rd party SUP’s from ConfigMgr.

http://www.shavlik.com/

 

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Jörgen Nilsson and Johan Schrewelius was next and they showed off how they do Windows 10 deployments for customers and what pitfalls one should try to avoid. Windows 10 update analytics on how to use this free tool from MS. They also showed off a neat OSD background application that Johan created to be able to keep track of the deployment on the machine and being able to access variables and logs without having “Enabled command support” enabled on your boot image in a production state since its only supposed to be used in testing and not during rollout because it makes it possible to get access to variables that contains certain passwords in plane text. You can find more about that tool over at http://ccmexec.com/2016/10/configuration-manager-osdbackground/

 

They also talked about how they are using webservices for certain tasks in the Task sequence instead of having a script in side the TS. More info here http://ccmexec.com/2016/10/web-service-for-os-deployment-sccm-configuration-manager-current-branch/
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Next speaker to the stand was Microsofts own Björn Axell who talked about “Building Secure Mobility with conditional Access”. He showed off some examples on what you could do like having certain rules being applied depending if a users was on premise or not.

 

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Jörgen Nilsson was back again and talked about what the most important features and changes made since the 1602 release and onward.

 

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T-shirts and powerbanks were handed out as well, either to people who asked good questions or gave the correct answer to a question aimed for the audience. And after that it was time for Lunch.

 

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After lunch it was another sponsors turn and that was Flexera Software, Patrick Jaspers talked about Patch Management integration with ConfigMgr and vulnerabilities. I wrote about Flexera or previously Sectunia in my blog post about Scug.no Client Management day back in august you can read it here https://timmyit.com/2016/08/24/event-scug-nos-enterprise-client-management-event-at-microsoft-in-norway/

One interesting side note which i didn’t know was that Flexera was the one who created InstallShield http://www.flexerasoftware.com/producer/products/software-installation/installshield-software-installer/

 

 


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And guess who entered the stage yet again, Mr Jörgen Nilsson who this time talked about “Customizing Windows 10 for the enterprise”. Working with new GPO’s, DISM and XML-files  to be able to achieve different results. He also mentioned the importance of configuring Event forwarding” in Win10 to ConfigMgr and also brought up that enterprises need to get away from IE11 since all the new features only applies to Edge from now on.

 

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Nicolaj Andersen was next with the talk about “Device and application Management in a modern world” with the focus on mobile devices and Intune. He talked about MAM-Policies and also a bit about how he think Application management will be in the future when more and more gets in to the cloud.

 

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Last but not least was Stefan Schörling and Mattias Borg talked and showed off “Securing your Clients against modern Threats” where they showed how an attack could look like and how hackers would be able to get credentials to your environment. They also talked about how one can mitigate threats like that and what things to think about.

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It was a long day over at Microsoft for sure but it was a blast.  It’s always fun to listen to people who are very passionate about what they do and also people who has very deep knowledge in their area of expertise. I have probably forgot to mention a bunch of stuff that happen that day but hopefully this will give you a short summery. Thanks to all the sponsors, Microsoft, All the awesome speakers and of course SCUG.SE for making this event happen and i hope there’s lots more to come.

 

Until next time, Cheers Timmy

 

TimmyIT 8:35 am on October 3, 2016  

ConfigMgr related videos from MS Ignite 2016

 

If you’re an IT Pro and are somewhat active on social media i don’t think you missed that MS Ignite just finished up last week and with that MS has released a bunch of videos from the event.

Here is a few of the videos I’ve watched and recommend you watch if you’re an SCCM admin.

The sheer amount of videos that came out the last few days is insane and will keep one busy for a while if one want to watch them all haha, i guarantee there’s something for everyone. Hopefully one day i will  have the opportunity to be at Ignite in person and experience it for my self but in the mean time i will be indulging in the videos they put up.

You can go to either https://myignite.microsoft.com/videos to watch the videos or to MS Ignites youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrhJmfAGQ5K81XQ8_od1iTg

To start out we have a presentation from my fellow countrymen Johan Arwidmark and Mikael Nyström talking about depolying Windows 10.

Master Windows 10 Deployments – Expert Level

https://myignite.microsoft.com/videos/2970

 

Learn what’s new with OSD in System Center Configuration Manager and Microsoft Deployment Toolkit

https://myignite.microsoft.com/videos/2968

 

Manage your mobile devices and apps with System Center Configuration Manager and Microsoft Intune

https://myignite.microsoft.com/videos/2814

 

Deploy Microsoft Office 365 Client using Configuration Manager

https://myignite.microsoft.com/videos/1244

 

and last but not least if you haven’t checked out Windows Server 2016 and all the new features yet this video is a great start.

 

Learn the top 10 reasons why you’ll like Windows Server 2016

https://myignite.microsoft.com/videos/1244

 

Until next time, cheers Timmy

TimmyIT 7:42 am on August 24, 2016  

Event – scug.no’s Enterprise Client Management event at Microsoft in Norway

 

On the 22nd of August i had the pleasure to attend this event organized by www.scug.no (System center user group norway) where the topic of the day was “Enterprise Client Management” held at Microsofts headoffice in Lysaker, Oslo. Which was free to attend , all you had to do was to sign up and get a ticket and show up at the event 😀

I traveled to Norway the day before the event and stayed at a friends place. The day of the event started out with me traveling to Lysaker in Oslo by train at around 07:15

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I arrived around 8am at Microsoft and by 08:30 there was breakfast being served (sadly forgot to take pictures, it was still morning okay? ). At 09:00 the meeting started with Marius Skovli (www.scug.no founder) greeting people welcome and giving the general outline of the day.

 

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The first MVP speaker was Jason Sandy‘s who talked about Maintenance and upkeep for SCCM site’s with the focus on SQL. Not just site server DB but also WSUS where one of the big things he mentioned was that before it has been a general rule that one shouldn’t touch the WSUS server configuration if you use it with ConfigMgr in the sense of declining updates but he emphasised that because of WSUS catalog being so huge as it is and containing updates that many times isn’t needed you can for example make a powershell script that declines all the updates that has the name “Beta” or maybe “office” if you aren’t using office software updates or what else it could be you know you can exclude. I will probably do a blog post on a script like that in the near future. He also talked a bit about pre-creating the databases and setting size limit on them.

 

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One of the topics was to avoid using the built in backup and Rebuild Indexes in ConfigMgr and instead using SQL Server to do those tasks instead.

 

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After a short break it was MVP Greg Ramsey‘s time to enter the stage and the topic was “Using PowerShell in ConfigMgr” with the focus being on how to do things on the client side with for example Compliance settings, detection methods and Remediation which is a funny coincidence because i actually wrote a blog post on that last week that’s coming out on the 29th of August but Greg wen’t in to more details on the different outputs that ConfigMgr works with and also troubleshooting the output. He also talked about one caveat that he also demonstrated where in you change the profile in powershell it can output a string directly when powerhsell launches with can mess up the detection method if the script is looking for a exit code of 0 or some specific string.

Uservoice please vote if you find this useful, i know i certainly think it is.

 

 

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One of Greg’s Scripts. Discovery for files in client Cache folder

 

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The time is now 11:15 and its lunch time, and we get served all sorts of baguette’s which was very needed at least for me because i had skipped the breakfast earlier. At 12 it was time for one of the sponsors who made this event possible to talk about their product. The company was Flexera (previously Secunia) which i personally never had heard about before but i have to say i was impressed by their product and their representative William Melby. The product he talked about was Software updates in SCCM but from 3rd parties like Java,Chrome or what ever 3rd party application the customer is using and how they help make sure that the latest patches for that application is secure and also ready to be deployed in your ConfigMgr environment with the help of their application that’s intergrated with ConfigMgr and Software updates. Very interesting i have to say and definitely something to take closer look on if you are managing 3rd party updates via Software updates and WSUS in ConfigMgr and want to stay secure and up to date with the latest patches.

 

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After that another break it was last but not least  Marius Skovli‘s turn to enter the stage and talk about “Control the uncontrollable with ConfigMgr and Intune” but before he started off there was a contest where Jason and Greg asked one question each to the audience and the person with the correct answer won a book by Kent Agerlund and Peter Daalmans “Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite: Planning and Implementation“. sadly i wasn’t one of the lucky winners but congrats to the ones who was 😀 

 

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For me personally i have very limited experience with EMS so i will definitely order a copy of Kent’s and Peter’s book and Marius talk gave me a good understanding on how things work. When Marius talk was done there was a few minutes for questions to Jason and Greg and oh i almost for got the other sponsor Nutanix who gave away a BB-8 ! I would have loved to bring a BB-8 with me on the train home but i wasn’t the lucky winner of that magnificent robot sadly.

There was a bunch more stuff happening and talked about that day then i can cover in a single blog post but i it was a truly amazing event, i had a blast! I learned a lot and just being in a room with so many talented people gives at least me so much motivation to learn more because there’s always something new to learn and i can only speak for my self but that is what’s drives me, the urge to learn more and more! It was a amazing event put together by Scug.no and i will definitely come back for future events.

 

Thanks again to Jason, Greg, Marius and all the sponsors and other people involved who made this event happen!

 

For more pictures go to Scug.no’s Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/scugnorway/?fref=ts

 

Until next time, Cheers Timmy

 

TimmyIT 5:43 pm on July 11, 2016  

End of a Chapter

 

Means to an end 

This part was written in may but never published until now.

After 4 years in the Philippines its soon time to end this chapter!

4 years ago in 2012 I had the opportunity to move from Sweden and start working in Manila, Philippines. It was one of those rare opportunities that one could´t just say no to. I still remember how scared I felt leading up to the decision to move across to the other side of the world where I had never been before but I said to my self

Whats the worst thing that could happen, That i don´t like it there? Well then I can just jump on the next plane home!

With that in mind moving across the globe was´t that scary any more, but as everything else in life there has been ups and downs. Career wise it was probably the best decision I ever made and I have learned so much during this time and especially about my self. Going out of your comfort zone is probably the best way to grow and develop as a person and for me, writing this blog is also a way of trying something new outside of my comfort zone.

At the end of May I will be moving back to Sweden and that opens up even more exiting opportunities that I can´t wait for!

The next chapter!

The plan was to publish this post at the same time i was leaving but i there was a lot of things going on with the move and everything so i honestly just forgot because i also did the 70-243 SCCM Exam just 2 days before leaving so packing all stuff and prepping for the exam  was rough but I’m finally settled down in Sweden and I’m currently working on the next blog post that will talk about Powershell and SCCM that hopefully will be published during this week and i will also do a post about the exam and my experience leading up to the test.

Cheers,

Timmy