Anything about IT

On march 4th Microsoft communicated on their Office 2010 Engineering blog that they are on Schedule with Office 2010 and will release it to manufacturing next month. For Enterprise customers Office 2010 will be available as of May 12th, consumers will get Office 2010 in June.

Microsoft Office 2010 Site

Planning, configuration, deployment and compatibility guides can be found here

Microsoft Office ONRAMP Site

Office OnRamp is the BPIO execution package that launches Office 2010 to the Enterprise business. Office OnRamp helps you drive the conversations you need to have with TDMs, ITPros and end users to renew EAs, drive Office 2010 deployment and win new EA business. OnRamp provides a complete set of orchestrated activities and marketing materials that give you the tools you need to demonstrate the value of Office 2010 in the BPIO framework and WIN!

Office OnRamp for TDMs:
Office 2010 Brochure for TDMs
Office 2010 TDM Pitch Deck for Office OnRamp
Office 2010 Client and Server Integration Whitepaper
Office 2010 Client and Server Integration Customer Ready Deck
Top New Capabilities for TDMs in Office 2010
Office 2010 End User and TDM Value Prop

Office OnRamp for IT Pros
Overview of 2010 for IT Pros
Tools for Planning Office 2010 Deployment
Security & Compliance
Application Compatibility for Office 2010
Office 2010 Deployment Considerations
Volume Activation for Office 2010
Web App Architecture & Deployment for Office 2010

Most IT pro’s probably don’t have a problem in getting access to the Windows 7 operating system installation sources because they can access them through their corporate volume license agreement and/or MSDN or TechNet subscription. But unfortunately there are still some out there who do not have such easy access to these sources.

For the use of Windows 7 on a primary device (the one that one uses on a daily basis) an official version of Windows 7 that comes either from the Corporate Volume media source or a separately acquired copy or pre-installed with a new computer must be used.

But if you need Windows 7 just for evaluation purposes Microsoft provides the following 2 options:

Windows 7 Enterprise 90-day Trial
The Windows 7 Enterprise 90-day trial program allows you to download the Windows 7 Enterprise 32 or 64 bit installation sources which can be used for evaluation purposes during 90 days. The Windows 7 Enterprise 90-day trial can be downloaded from here. Note that prior downloading the sources you must fill in a form which also includes a question about your occupation. If you select a profile that does not fit to this program, you don’t get access to the sources.

Microsoft Windows 7 90-Day Eval VHD
This is a preconfigured virtual machine set contained within the Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) format. To run Windows 7 within the VHD you must have access to a system that has Microsoft Hyper-V installed. The Microsoft Windows 7 90-Day Evaluation VHD can be downloaded from here. I recommend to read the Readme prior downloading the sources.

Finally let me also mention the Windows 7 Test Drive which provides access to a Windows 7 client that runs remotely on a Microsoft hosted virtual infrastructure.

Just found this post on Trevor Sullivan’s Tech Room blog which explains how to automate the Windows 7 Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) installation. Read the entire article here

Adobe Flash and Shockwave are probably one of those most installed applications on home and enterprise computers. Working within the End User Computing environment for large enterprise customers since quite a while, I can’t remember of just one company that wouldn’t maintain Adobe Flash and Shockwave in their list of enterprise standard applications.

But when it comes to distributing these applications, many companies seem to go down the difficult route instead of taking the easy one. When distributing applications within Enterprise environments, you want them to install automatically, hence you need a software package.

Many companies seem to create their Adobe Flash and Shockwave installation packages by capturing the installation sources that are used when initiating an end user installation from the Adobe website as shown in the picture below.

The challenge of this method is that you need to capture the sources while the web based installer is running (these are stored temporarily on the system) and that you probably want to get rid of any additional software that is being installed such as the Google Toolbar in this case.

Many people seem not to be aware that Adobe does provide redistributable media for enterprise deployment of their Adobe Flash and Adobe Shockwave players. On the download pages of the appropriate Player, you will see a link called “Distribute Flash Player” or “Distribute Shockwave Player”

By clicking on one of these links you are being redirected to the Adobe Player Licensing website where you find the links to apply for a license and obtain the installation media to distribute the players within your enterprise.

License Flash Player ›
License Shockwave Player ›

You will have to provide some information like Company name, number of seats and the operating system used. Once you have submitted your request, it takes about 5-10 minutes until you will receive an e-mail with the links to download the players.

Well, that is what I consider as taking the easy route, clicking on a link, filling in a form, and after let’s say 15 minutes you get the install_flash_player_10_plugin.msi for Flash and sw_lic_full_installer.msi for Shockwave and you’re ready to go.

A similar method is available for Adobe Reader. I plan to post an article about that soon.

if you have watched the Windows XP Mode IT Pro Deployment Video, you might be interested in the scripts they’ve used to automatically install XP Mode and create virtual machines. You can download them from here

If you consider using XP Mode, then I recommend watching this video. This video contains a good tutorial on how to install and configure XP mode including a lot of additional hints. Furthermore the video explains how to create a customized XP Mode VHD for deployment on multiple clients.

The video can be downloaded from here

ImageX is a command-line tool for capturing, modifying and applying file based disk images. ImageX is included within the Windows Automated Installation Kit.

In this post I want to focus on the functionality provided by ImageX to split and merge image files. So why would you want to split and merge image files? Well think of the following scenarios:

• Your image is too big to fit on one DVD and using Dual Layer DVD media is not an option.
• Network related limitations to transfer large files
• Merge image files provided on multiple DVDs for network based deployment

For the purpose of writing this article, I prepared a simple folder structure to demonstrate the capture, split and merge process.

The folder “Output1” is used to store the initial captured image file which contains the data stored within the “source” folder. The source folder was filled with some wallpapers located in C:\Windows\Web\Wallpaper The folder “Output2” is used to store the splitted image files. The folder “Output2” is used to store the merged image file created from the splitted image files that are stored in folder “Output2”.

To run the following commands you must open the “Deployment Tools command prompt” which gets automatically added to your start menu when having installed the WAIK. Note that all commands must be run with Administrator privileges.

 Image Capture

Use the following command to capture the first image:

imagex /capture c:\data\splitmerge\source c:\data\splitmerge\output1\splitmerge.wim "splitmerge" /COMPRESS maximum

For validation purposes, I talk about that later, we also produce an image info file using the following command:

imagex /info /xml c:\data\splitmerge\output1\splitmerge.wim > info1.xml

Image Split

Now we are going to split the previously created splitmerge.wim file. Since we are dealing with a rather small image file, the split is set at 20 MB.

imagex /split c:\data\splitmerge\output1\splitmerge.wim c:\data\splitmerge\output2\splitmerge.swm 20

and again we create an image info file.

imagex /info /xml c:\data\splitmerge\output2\splitmerge.swm > info2.xml

Image Merge

Finally we are going to merge the previously splitted image file back into a single image file.

imagex /ref c:\data\splitmerge\output2\splitmerge*.swm /check /export c:\data\splitmerge\output2\splitmerge.swm 1 c:\data\splitmerge\output3\splitmerge.wim "splitmerge" /COMPRESS maximum

and create the image info file

imagex /info /xml c:\data\splitmerge\output3\splitmerge.wim > info3.xml

The Output

If all worked fine, the following files should be present:

• C:\DATA\splitmerge\output1\splitmerge.wim
• C:\DATA\splitmerge\output2\splitmerge.swm, splitmerge2.swm and depending on the size of the source folder your might also get an additional splitmerge3.swm
• C:\DATA\splitmerge\output3\splitmerge.wim
• C:\DATA\splitmerge\info1.xml
• C:\DATA\splitmerge\info2.xml
• C:\DATA\splitmerge\info3.xml

Checking data integrity

When comparing the file size of the splitmerge.wim stored in c:\data\splitmerge\output1 with splitmerge.wim stored in c:\data\splitmerge\output3 you will probably notice that the size in bytes differs. The same applies for the total size of the swm files stored in c:\data\splitmerge\output2.

Well, forget about these file/folder sizes, to ensure that your final wim file contains the exact same data as the initial wim file, we’ll take a look at the previously created image info files.

All of the 3 image info files have the same value stored for:

<FILECOUNT>43</FILECOUNT>
<TOTALBYTES>41339064</TOTALBYTES>

Happy imaging !

Related articles:

Getting your OS Restore DVD to work with large image files

During my weekly “let’s see what’s new”  search on some of my favorite websites, I found the “Bitlocker Deployment Sample Resources” on the MSDN Code Gallery. The Resource Page contains a lot of documentation and useful script samples for the deployment and management of Microsoft Bitlocker.

I’ve spend nearly 3 hours in troubleshooting today to find out the reason why a custom IE7 package, that worked fine on Windows XP SP2 would not work on Windows XP SP3.

If you are using a custom Internet Explorer 7 package (created with the Internet Explorer Administration Toolkit) and plan to rebuild your enterprise image with Windows XP SP3, you might be interested in this article.

Being one of the lucky ones who was able to sign-up to the Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview program, I have started looking at the deployment of Microsoft Office 2010 today.

My first observation was that unfortunately the provided documentation seems to be ahead of the Office Installation sources that have been made available for download. I noticed this when making an attempt to run the setup.exe /admin command which would normally launch the Office Customization Wizard, but it wouldn’t because the necessary components that are usually located within the Admin folder aren’t available yet, in fact the whole Admin folder as such seems to be missing. OK, so no advanced customizations for now, back to basic.

The current Office 2010 beta that is made available for download is packaged into an executable called “O2010_SingleImage_retail_ship_x86_en-us.exe”. (32 bit version). To create the administrative installation point, extract the content using the following command:

O2010_SingleImage_retail_ship_x86_en-us.exe /extract:c:\office2010

You should then see the following content within the C:\Office2010 folder.

As a next step, open the config.xml file located within the folder SingleImage.WW and modify the file as shown below. (replace the product key with the one you received).

And finally create a batch file that runs the following command:

setup.exe /config SingleImage.WW\config.xml

Office 2010 Beta will now be installed in silent mode. this might be helpful when planning an automated deployment for testing purposes.

More about Office 2010:

Microsoft Office 2010 Engineering blog

Backstage with Office 2010

Office 2010 – The Movie (I recommend watching this one)

Office 2010 for IT Pros

A Look At Office 2010 with Chris Capossela

Microsoft has released the Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V version 1) Planning, Deployment and Operations Guide. The document can be found here

This article discusses some thoughts around Windows 7 and Service Pack 1.

Windows 7 Won’t Need SP1, but Will Still Need 12 to 18 Months Before Deployment Begins

Speaking with various people I often notice that some do not understand in detail the concepts and benefits around the Windows Multilanguage Packs. The video below provides an in depth overview around the concepts and use of Windows MUI Packs.  Hope it’s usefull.

When it comes to OS deployment the size of the image to some extend does matter. Windows by default comes with a large set of plug and play device drivers that are included within the operating system installation sources.

Prestaged drivers in Windows Vista and Windows 7 are located under C:\Windows\system32\Driverstore.

If you run the following command against your mounted Windows 7 image file, you get a list of all PnPdrivers included within the Driverstore.

Dism /image:c:\mount /Get-Drivers /all

Now getting back to the image size. Looking at how we could eventually save image size space, I took a closer look at the Windows 7 Driverstore folder size, that on an installed system uses 624 MB. So that looked like a potential candidate to reduce image size.

As mentioned above 624 MB is what the Driverstore uses on an installed system, but how much does it consume within an image, taking into account that there the content is compressed.

Running the following command creates a separate WIM (image) file with just Driverstore content included.

Imagex /capture c:\temp\driverstore\ c:\temp\win7drv.wim “win7driverstore”

The result is that 624 MB Driverstore content now just uses 219 MB. If we add the /compress max option to the above Command brings the size even down to 197 MB. 

Conclusion: Beside the fact that officially the default driver store cannot be modified anyway (if I am wrong here let me know), I think that carrying those +- 220 MB don’t make much of a difference.

Great article i just finished reading about automating virtual machine host deployment on Hyper-V.

Download the complete Technet Magazine January 2009 edition here. When having trouble reading the CHM file, read this.