Hi,

If you read this post, that means you read my blog and I want to thank you for this!

Due the fact that I want to specialize on System Center products, Configuration Manager mainly, I decided to move from spaces to a new domain I set up a few hours ago: http://systemmanagement.ro.

If you would like to read my future posts, my kind request is that you update the rss feed and web addresses with the new ones:
http://systemmanagement.ro/blog and http://systemmanagement.ro/blog/feed.

Thank you and see you there,
Vit

I think almost everybody who tried to make an unattended deployment of Office 2007 experienced some problems. Unless you use switches or make all the necessary customization settings in Office Customization Tool (OCT), your “silent” installation will fail without giving you much details in SCCM/Office log files. This is happening because Office 2007 installation not being setup properly to run silently, requiring no user interaction at all.

Only today, one Senior Support Engineer from Microsoft, wrote about this in “clear text” (I don’t like the word “officially”…). If he posted this earlier, I could sleep two hours more in the night I customized OCT for the first time.

So here is his tip on how to create a customized MSP file with OCT:

1. Go to the original package source that contains the Office 2007 setup files
2. From the directory that contains the Office 2007 setup files, run setup.exe /admin. This should open the Office Customization Toolkit (OCT)
3. Select to Create a new Setup customization file
4. In the “Install location and organization name”, set the default installation location and organization name.
5. Click on Licensing and user interface. Make sure you enter a valid product key, check the EULA checkbox and set Display level to None. Completion notice checkbox should not be checked and Suppress modal should be checked.
6. Save the MSP file by going to File --> Save. Give the file a name and save it to the Updates folder located in the Office 2007 installation source folder. By saving it to the Updates folder, the /adminfile switch will not need to be used as part of setup.exe. If the file is not saved to the Updates folder, make sure that the /adminfile switch is used as part of setup.exe and that it points to the MSP file just created.

Further more, with OCT you can customize almost everything regarding how your Word/Excel etc. applications will run. What I liked most is the possibility to create the default profile in Outlook if you are using an Exchange server in your organization.

Don’t forget to save the MSP file and to put the file in Updates folder or to use /adminfile <path to MST file> switch .

For the last 3 days I’ve been doing one thing: trying to deploy Vista on a new PC with SCCM 2007 R2.
Trying, because I never succeeded, until a few minutes ago. 

I noticed there are many people who have this problem and some of them still not resolved the issue and are using some workarounds or gave up.

So, suppose you have created a task sequence, advertised it and booted from task sequence media; if you receive an error at “Setup Windows and ConfigMgr” step, check the Product Key! It might be that the key is not correct, so either write another one or remove the Product Key at all from “Apply Windows Settings” step in PostInstall section and you will have to provide it during the install phase.

Next time I booted the PC from the TS media, at the Setup Windows and ConfigMgr step I was asked to provide a product key. I entered my Business edition product key and clicked next. Error!?! WTH is going on here?!! As Vista can be installed without providing a product key at the setup phase, I just clicked Next without entering it. This way, Windows Vista deployed successfully but not “as unattended as I wish”.

Maybe my experience with this will help some folks and save their time…

A few days ago, I had the possibility to test Virtual Machine Manager 2007 on a physical computer not in a virtual environment. Although Windows Server 2008 is not a supported operating system for Virtual Machine Manager 2007, I decided to try it.
First time, I had no luck to make it start after a successful install. Mainly because I played around with some services and its’ log on as rights.

Second time it was ok. I will explain in detail what I installed and the install order.

• Installed Server 2008 Enterprise x64 operating system. Installed all available updates and added it to domain.
• In BIOS, enabled hardware virtualization and hardware data execution protection and then installed Hyper-V role using domain admin credentials.
• Installed 64 bit of Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1.
• Installed Virtual Machine Manager 2007 prerequisites (.NET 3.0, WinRM, BITS, Windows Internal Database, PowerShell… don’t remember if it's all) from features menu, although there are some notes that tells you to install WinRM and PowerShell from certain web sites.
• Installed Virtual Machine Manager 2007 Server using default ports and settings. At this step I also installed SQL Server Express edition and let it use it’s default instance name.
• Installed Virtual Machine Manager 2007 Administrator Console on the same machine, also with default port and settings.
• From the Services window, changed the Log On as credential of the SQL Service instance to my domain admin username and password.
• Disabled UAC.

After this, I was able to start VMM Administrator Console.

Tip: after installing Hyper-V, I had problems with my remote desktop connection. I kept receiving the following error: “Because of an error in data encryption, this session will end. Please try connecting to remote computer again”. I could not resolve this issue until I have found one post on a forum: in Device Manager, expand Network adapters and open your NIC’s properties. Go to Advanced tab and look for something like “Large Send Offload (IPv4)” (this depend on your NIC), and set the value to Disable.

Looks like we have one more category of handicapped people.

3 out 6 parking places are taken by this type of car. Actually there were 4 cars, but one left before i took the picture.

This is the parking of Bucharest Mall, managed by BMG security guys. Go ahead guys, make some money for yourself selling parking places! Good job!