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Category Archives: Walkthrough

These posts, normally longer in length, completely walk through an entire technology or project.

Easily Install Unknown Devices on Windows 8 (and 8.1)

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Over the weekend, I set a personal goal to upgrade all of my personal machines to Windows 8.1. Two installs went perfect! One went very very bad. As in “sad face blue screen of death” kind of bad…

Easily Install Unknown Devices on Windows 8 (and 8.1)

After doing a clean install, I was left with quite a few unknown and uninstalled devices. Taking a few pages for our automated hardware installation setup, I began reinstalling the hardware. Here is the quickest and cleanest way that I’ve found to install unknown devices on Windows 8 (and 8.1) machines.

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The Poor Man’s Free Group Policy Monitoring

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What’s not to love about Group Policy! It can configure printers, set permissions, and deploy software. What can’t it do? To start, Central Reporting like SCCM….

Group Policy Monitoring

If you want pretty graphs like this, stick to SCCM…

In most environments, we don’t need pretty pie graphs like those above (if anything, we just need more pies). What is needed is a simple method of seeing when a GPO is not applying correctly. This method should let you see if the issue is with multiple machines or just a single device. What follows below, while very rudimentary, is the poor man’s central group policy monitoring tool.

Oh Yeah! Let's see SCCM manage this!

Oh Yeah! Let’s see SCCM manage this!

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The Default Logon ScreenSaver – Distributed Announcements

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Much like Genie from Aladdin, Group Policy Admins have unlimited power. Today, we are going to extend that power just a bit by configuring a custom default logon screensaver.  This is the screensaver that appears when no user is logged into the computer. This guide will cover the GPO creation and how you can safely let your staff manage this system.

Why should I bother with a default logon screensaver?

Blue Genie Answer: The screensaver can rotate through pictures; allowing you to share useful information with your staff. This can effectively turn your computers into a distributed announcement system for free.

Red Genie Answer: Because the screensaver can rotate through pictures, you can partner up with local businesses and sell advertisements. You can then offer staff members an opt-out option for a small yearly subscription! Absolute genius!

Logon ScreenSaver

As a practical example, our media specialists highlight new books that are available for checkout. This screensaver appears on the media center computers and encourages students to check out these books (an example is below).

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Shadow Groups: Active Directory’s Dark Side

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Have you ever spent time troubleshooting a problem only to discover that a computer or user wasn’t in the right security group? Shadow Groups (sometimes called dynamic security groups) can stop this problem! They work by automatically adding objects to a group based on a name, Organizational Unit, or another attribute. So get ready to embrace the dark side of Active Directory – we are about to set up some shadow security groups!

Shadow Groups
If you only knew the power of the Dark Side…
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Deploy Office 2013 with Group Policy – The Simple Way!

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You would think that Microsoft would make it easy to deploy Office 2013 with Group Policy! Well, they don’t – at least not in a traditional sense. To quote Microsoft, “the setup architecture for Office 2013 uses multiple .msi files and the Office Setup program is an executable (.exe) file.” Smelling spin, I tried out Bing’s new Hidden Meaning Translator:

 

Deploy Office 2013 with Group Policy

In this walk-through, we are going to deploy Office 2013 with Group Policy Scripts and try to retain a bit of our sanity. Here goes!

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