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| NOTE FROM THE EDITOR  Before we jump into our usual what's coming up, I want to take a moment to thank all of you who subscribe to this newsletter. It's always great to hear your feedback on the content we feature here, as well as your thoughts on Windows 7 and the Springboard Series on TechNet. Thank you so very much for your support.
This month's newsletter focuses on deploying and stabilizing your Windows environment. From leveraging troubleshooting packs to troubleshooting your operating system (OS) deployment, check out some great tips and tricks to help you get a handle on your Windows 7 pilots and deployments-and help make the steps involved easier. We have also have some great content that is newly available on how to get your Windows Internet Explorer 6 application to work in Windows 7 (see the New Resources section below). Want more help with Internet Explorer compatibility? Join us live at 9:00 AM Pacific Time on Thursday, September 30, 2010 for a virtual, interactive roundtable discussion on migration strategies, standards, and support for organizations moving from Internet Explorer 6 to Internet Explorer 8. Ask your questions during the live event with our online tool-or submit your questions in advance to vrtable@microsoft.com. In addition, watch for a new article, frequently asked questions and other great resources on this topic this month on the Springboard Series blog. In other news, Springboard is coming to Europe! Watch for details next month on how to register for the Springboard Series tour (representing Windows 7, Office 2010, MDOP, and Internet Explorer 9) that will visit the Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Austria in late October and early November. The tour will wrap up with a full week at Tech•Ed EMEA in Berlin, Germany from November 8th-12th. If you're planning to come to Tech•Ed EMEA in November, the TechDays Canada Vancouver event on September 14th, or the TechMentor Conference in Las Vegas on October 19th, make sure to find me and tell me you're a Springboard Series Insider! Stephen Rose
Sr. Community Manager, Microsoft Windows Client IT Pro
stephen.rose@microsoft.com |
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| NEW RESOURCES Addressing Application Compatibility When Migrating to Internet Explorer 8 as Part of a Windows 7 Deployment
Get more information on Internet Explorer 8 compatibility issues and helpful insight into remediation strategies for migrating web applications, as well as the tools and processes available to help make migration easier. To learn more about understanding and addressing Internet Explorer 8 application compatibility from the developer perspective, check out the companion piece on MSDN. Internet Explorer 8 Application Compatibility List
Download a spreadsheet listing software applications which are compatible or not compatible with Internet Explorer 8, based on public support statements from software publishers, or statements made to Microsoft from software publishers. Step-by-Step Video Tutorials: Microsoft Advanced Group Policy Management (AGPM)
Part of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP), Advanced Group Policy Management can help you overcome the challenges that can affect Group Policy management. Watch a short introduction on how AGPM can help simplify offline editing, change control, and role-based delegation then dive deep into videos on specific tasks related to creating, configuring, and managing Group Policy objects in your environment: Even More Step-by-Step Video Tutorials! Microsoft Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset (DaRT)
Also part of MDOP, the Microsoft DaRT is a powerful set of tools that can help you diagnose and troubleshoot computers. Start with the three-minute overview then delve into the other short videos in this series to familiarize yourself with the tools included in DaRT and put them to use in your organization: |
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| SOMETHING TO BLOG ABOUT Windows 7 Deployment Learning Portal: Now in 11 Languages
Assess your current knowledge of Windows 7 deployment processes and tools-and get specific recommendations to help you reach the top of your deployment game. Originally piloted in the United Kingdom, the Windows 7 Deployment Learning Portal is an online assessment tool that is now available in 11 languages: English, French, Spanish, German, Japanese, Russian, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Italian, and Brazilian Portuguese.  Troubleshooting Group Policy Management
By Brad McCabe, Product Manager - Windows Division, Microsoft Corporation
Group Policy can be one of the most powerful tools to helping manage your IT infrastructure. Part of the challenge of Group Policy however lies in that very power.
Let's look at a simple scenario: you use a Group Policy object (GPO) to set values to enforce security settings in your network. One day, you start to get a flood of calls to the helpdesk about applications that are no longer working for users. After spending time investigating you realize that someone changed the settings for AppLocker and those settings are being pushed out to all of our end users via some GPO. With numerous GPOs, how do you figure out which one changed? How do you determine what the prior values where to rollback, and who made the change? Better yet, how do you stop this scenario from happening altogether?
With Advance Group Policy Management (AGPM), an extension to the existing Group Policy Management Console (GPMC) you are already familiar with, you can quickly run a query to see what GPOs have been updated and by whom. After talking with the person that made the change you can roll back to any prior version with just a few mouse clicks.
Best of all, if you already have AGPM deployed you likely would not have experienced this scenario as you would have been able to use its offline capabilities to make GPO changes in a safe, offline sandbox to confirm that those changes are exactly what you wanted. AGPM also has a customizable workflow so you can require that all GPO changes are reviewed and approved by the correct personal before being deployed to production. With AGPM's fine grain security model, you can even limit GPO administrators rights to specific GPO to ensure that changes don't accidently happen to other Group Policies that might be managed by other teams.
To learn more about AGPM, check out the great short video tutorials mentioned above as well as these articles: Brad McCabe is a Product Manager in the Windows Client team working on MDOP. He is a well-known speaker and author, and a frequent contributor to The Official MDOP Blog. TechNet Edge: New and Improved
Three years ago, TechNet launched a community portal for IT professionals, better known as TechNet Edge. Since that time, Edge has grown into a vibrant community with over 2 million unique visitors each month seeking relevant information about the Windows platform and a large variety of other topics. To improve your experience on the site, TechNet Edge has now been integrated into the TechNet network. What does this mean? It means you can still find help and guidance for Windows, solutions for common IT problems, and learn about industry trends, but with faster site and video performance and more local content.
For the latest Edge content on Windows 7, visit the Windows topic area on TechNet Edge. |
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| TIPS AND TRICKS  Creating Tools to Do the Troubleshooting and Repairing for You in Windows 7
By Jeremy Chapman, Senior Product Manager - Windows Division, Microsoft Corporation
Windows has evolved over the years with various tools to diagnose and repair issues. Everyone probably remembers the in-box tools to repair wireless connections in Windows XP. They started getting better in Windows Vista, then Windows 7 comes along with PowerShell in-box and an engine to diagnose, repair, and validate fixes automatically. If you open "Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Troubleshooting" on a Windows 7 machine, you will see all of the in-box Troubleshooters to diagnose and repair things like network connections, Aero desktop effects, and audio playback. What you may not know is that you can build your own Troubleshooters, so they look and feel just like the in-box items and troubleshoot issues specific to your environment. You might have been doing this for a while with custom scripts, but now you can convert those so they look like the ones natively in Windows-in this article, I will tell you how. 
This is an image of a custom troubleshooter I built to diagnose and repair issues with a custom application and connection broker called IT Connection Manager. In this case, I needed to look for a service state required by the application and correct it if not set correctly. The first thing you need to do is download and install the Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows 7 and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 (Could the title be longer? Yes, we could have spelled out "SDK" and "SP.") Once installed, the tool you'll need to use is the Windows Troubleshooting Pack Designer in the Tools folder of the SDK in your Start menu. A Troubleshooting Pack consists of Root Causes and each Root Cause has: a Troubleshooter to detect issues, a Resolver to fix issues if detected, and a Verifier to see if the Resolver worked (usually you would rerun the Troubleshooter script for the Verifier). Each of these items contains simple rules, but the scripts are where the actual detection and fixing is done. 
PowerShell is the scripting engine behind the Windows Troubleshooting Platform and anything you can do in PowerShell can be integrated into your Troubleshooting Packs. 
Once you've defined your root causes and written your Troubleshooter, Resolver, and (optional) Verifier scripts, you can create the Troubleshooting Pack by clicking on the Build menu item in the Designer and selecting Build Pack. The output of the Designer and the Troubleshooter itself is a .diagcab file and the file once finished needs to be code-signed for the Troubleshooter to work. That was just a crash course on building Troubleshooting Packs. For more information, check out the TechNet Library articles for the Windows Troubleshooting Platform. Happy troubleshooting. Jeremy Chapman is a Senior Product Manager at Microsoft responsible for enterprise OS deployment tools. He has contributed to the current generation of the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, as well as numerous videos and articles on deployment tools. |
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| COMMUNITY UPDATE  Inside Setup - Troubleshooting Windows Deployment Issues in the Real World
By Johan Arwidmark, Microsoft MVP - Setup & Deployment, Management Infrastructure
It's certainly great to see so many companies migrating to Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, but it is also great to see that they are taking advantage of the new deployment tools that have been released in the same period. That being said, when compared with Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 deployment, deploying the new Windows platform is quite different. In this article, I will give you a few tips and tricks for quickly solving common issues with Windows deployments, both with core setup tools and with deployment solutions like Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2010 and Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (ConfigMgr) 2007. The Windows Setup Engine No matter what tool you are using to deploy Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2, at some point it will execute the new Windows setup engine. It could be the full setup experience you get when running setup.exe or the mini-setup equivalent after applying a Sysprep Windows image using tools like ImageX from the Windows Automated Installation Kit (AIK). Whenever setup is running, it needs configuration information; it can prompt for it, but most often it queries an answer file (unattend.xml) for the information. The setup engine is logging all its action to a log file, the setupact.log file, and it is this file we need to review when Windows setup encounters an error. Issue #1 - Windows Setup Prompts with Strange Error Code: In the scenario depicted below, we are deploying Windows 7 with a unattend.xml file, but it fails in the middle of the setup we a strange error code: 
Solution: Don't click OK; instead press Shift-F10, locate the setupact.log file (this file will be in different locations depending on when setup fails). In this case, the real error is that we typed an incorrect computer name into our unattend.xml which setupact.log showed. These are the lines from setupact.log. On purpose I had assigned a computer name with more than 16 characters to my unattend.xml file (which I have seen customers do), and that is what caused setup to choke. 
Tip! - For a list of possible locations for the setupact.log file, see http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9743648. Using MDT 2010 Lite Touch to Deploy Windows When using MDT 2010 Lite Touch to deploy Windows, issues are more complex to troubleshoot. This is because MDT adds another layer of tools and scripts on top of the core setup engine and Windows AIK tools. Luckily MDT also provides additional error handling and log files that can help us figure out what's going on so, in the end, we are better suited for troubleshooting. To better understand troubleshooting you need to keep in mind how the process goes when deploying Windows with it. When using MDT to deploy Windows we use a so-called Task Sequence. The Task Sequence is our list of steps or actions that needs to be done during deployment. Some commonly-used steps are formatting the drive, injecting drivers, running Windows setup with an answer file, installing applications, and installing updates. The MDT 2010 Lite Touch bare metal deployment process looks like this: 1. The boot image starts from CD/USB or PXE and, once started, connects back to the deployment server. 2. The deployment wizard starts and reads the deployment settings (rules) from the server and either starts the deployment automatically or prompt you for input (depending on the settings on the server). The settings are stored in memory. 3. The selected Task Sequence is started and starts executing the actions or steps in it. For example to make sure setup get the correct settings the following actions are involved a. Gather - Reads the deployment settings
b. Configure - Updates the unattend.xml with the appropriate settings
c. Apply Operating System - Executes setup.exe with the updated unattend.xml file 4. After the operating system image is applied the task sequence will reboot the machine and continue where it left of after reboot. When troubleshooting MDT 2010 Lite Touch, we also use log files, but they are stored in different locations than setupact.log. Each MDT script generates its own log file but the BDD.log contains a summarized view of all other MDT log files. The logs are stored in X:\MININT\SMSOSD\OSDLOGS, C:\MININT\SMSOSD\OSDLOGS or C:\Windows\Temp\DeploymentLogs depending on when the deployment fails. BDD.log is the master log file, but the SMSTS.log file may also yield additional clues to why a Lite Touch deployment breaks. (By the way, the log files are formatted to be read by the trace32 utility. Issue #2 - MDT 2010 Lite Touch Fails Connecting to the Server: This is a quite common error, but how do we troubleshoot it? In this case, I know that the user and password provided is correct. 
The next step is to press F8 to get a command prompt. Since this error is very early in the process, there is no C: volume created to store log files so MDT stores them in RAM. So after opening the BDD.LOG with trace32 (or Notepad) in X:\MININT\SMSOSD\OSDLOGS (the RAM drive) we can see the following: 
The real error is that we have a typo in our rules. The deployment share is shared as MDTProduction$ but we have typed MDTProducton$ (without the "i") in the rules. Using ConfigMgr 2007 to Deploy Windows As when using MDT 2010 Lite Touch to deploy Windows, adding ConfigMgr 2007 to the picture makes deployment issues more complex to troubleshoot when compared with just using the Windows 7 DVD. MDT 2010 Zero Touch components will reduce the pain by adding more than 100 commonly-wanted features, including additional error handling, to ConfigMgr 2007. In contrast with common belief, MDT actually reduces the complexity when working with ConfigMgr OSD, not the other way around. When deploying Windows using ConfigMgr 2007, ConfigMgr stores its additional log files in X:\Windows\Temp, C:\_SmsTaskSequence\SMSOSD\OSDLOGS and C:\Windows\System32\CCM\Logs or C:\Windows\SysWOW64\CCM\Logs depending on the platform. With ConfigMgr, the master log file is SMSTS.log but the MDT log files may also have useful information. To access the log files on the client, check the Enable command support (testing only) box in the boot image properties to enable F8 while in Windows PE. 
Other Useful Logs when Deploying Windows - Cbs.log - for troubleshooting DISM commands to inject drivers, language packs, updates, etc.
- Setupapi.dev.log - for troubleshooting drivers
- Netsetup.log - for troubleshooting domain join issues
- WindowsUpdate.log - for troubleshooting Windows Update installations
Happy troubleshooting! Johan Arwidmark, MCSE and MVP in Setup & Deployment, is a consultant and all-around geek specializing in enterprise Windows deployment solutions. He speaks at several worldwide conferences each year, including MMS and TechEd, and is actively involved in deployment communities like deployvista.com, deploymentcd.com and myitforum.com. |
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| TWEET ALERT In support of our efforts to stay on top of the latest tips and trends, here is who we are following for our summer Twitter reading list: - @Microsoft Press - Publisher of books and e-books about Microsoft tools and technologies, programming best practices, and much more. Get a sneak peek at upcoming titles.
- @thurrott (Paul Thurrott) - Also known as the guy behind the SuperSite for Windows, Paul shares links the hottest news in the world of Windows plus helpful tips and tricks.
- @chrisavis - Calling himself "an aging geek who struggles to 'get it'," Chris works as an IT Evangelist at Microsoft. Follow him for reviews and tips on the latest products and tools for IT pros.
- @TheWindowsClub - Owned by Microsoft MVP Anand Khanse, an end user and Windows enthusiast offering information and tips on the Windows OS.
If you would like to be considered for this column, send a message to Stephen Rose via Twitter @stephenlrose and tell him, in 140 characters or less, why we should feature you next month. Also, for the latest information on what's going on here at Microsoft follow the Springboard Series @MSSpringboard. |
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| EVENTS AND TRAINING Springboard Series Virtual Roundtable: Migrating from Internet Explorer 6 to Internet Explorer 8 on Windows 7
September 30, 2010 9:00 AM Pacific Time
Join us live at 9:00 AM Pacific Time on Thursday, September 30, 2010 for a virtual, interactive roundtable discussion on migration strategies, standards, and support for organizations moving from Internet Explorer 6 to Internet Explorer 8. Ask your questions live during the event with our online tool - or submit your questions in advance to vrtable@microsoft.com. Business Insights Webinar: Discover the Total Economic Impact (TEI) of Windows Internet Explorer 8 (Level 100)
Tuesday, September 28, 2010 9:00 AM Pacific Time
Attend this webcast to hear how the new Forrester Total Economic Impact (TEI) model can be used to estimate the tangible value of Internet Explorer 8, either alongside a Windows 7 operating system migration or in a Windows XP environment. Topics discussed will include the benefits of Internet Explorer 8 through improved security and productivity, while weighing the costs of configuring, deploying, and maintaining the browser. New Learning Plans for Windows 7
Gain the knowledge and skills you need to develop applications and troubleshooting packs for Windows 7 with these Learning Plans from Microsoft Learning: Get Microsoft Certification Packs and Save Up to 20% Plus Second Shots
Take your IT Career to its next destination. Microsoft Certification Packs with Free Second Shots can help you get your Certification, validate your knowledge, launch your career, or move your next position. Purchase packs of one to five exams along with free re-takes on every exam purchased and save up to 20%. |
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| UPCOMING WEBCASTS TechNet Webcast: Windows PowerShell Basics for IT Professionals (Level 200)
Wednesday, September 22, 2010 10:00 AM Pacific Time
Learn the basics of Windows PowerShell, including parsing, piping, getting help, using variables and operators, and flow control. By the end of this session, you should understand enough to create simple commands and be comfortable enough to explore Windows PowerShell on your own. Business Insights Webcast: Windows Deployment (Level 100)
Wednesday, October 20, 2010 11:00 AM Pacific Time
Windows operating system deployment has evolved in all areas, making it possible to have faster and more flexible image creation, automated software composition depending on specific user needs, and faster and more robust data migration from previous environments. Tune in for an explanation and demonstration of tools, processes, tips, and what to expect when moving to the Windows 7 operating system and a more optimized desktop standard. |
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| SNEAK PEEK: FOR INSIDERS ONLY The following resources will be released in September on the Springboard Series on TechNet. Bookmark or subscribe to the Windows Client Headlines feed and receive automatic notification when these and other resources, announcements, and downloads are released. - On September 15th, when Internet Explorer 9 Beta is released, check out our exclusive Internet Explorer 9 Beta IT pro content which includes a technical overview, FAQ, and screencast to help you make the most out of your evaluation.
- New Desktop Virtualization "Top Task" zone to help you quickly locate step-by-step technical guidance, tools, and expert advice on the latest virtualization options for your client computers and applications.
- New content on how to create a steady state using Group Policy settings and Microsoft technologies.
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