First a huge thanks to the many that tuned in to our 3 webinars on ConfigMgr Challenges in 2017. As promised here are answers to the many questions we had. For more questions, please reach out to Jason Sandys @JasonSandys or Kent Agerlund @Agerlund. For those who didn’t have a chance to attend, recordings are available here: https://info.flexerasoftware.com/SVM-WBNR-We-Speak-Geek-SCCM-Admin-Priorities

Q &A From the North America webinar

  1. With Windows 10 Servicing – how have you found keeping these up to date? I have 10k workstations, and with resources i can’t keep up with 6 monthly releases. With the products i have to get updated/tested/confirmed with the image, it’s a full time job in itself
    1. First advice is not to underestimate the work involved. Servicing in general requires good planning, testing and getting all the relevant teams together. We have done many Windows 10 deployments and servicing projects in 2017, and the work involved in servicing often comes as a surprise to many.
  2. Can you share the link to the WSUS maintenance blog post
    1. https://damgoodadmin.com/2017/11/30/software-update-maintenance-its-a-thing-that-you-should-do/
  3. OMS – Upgrade Analytics also work for Applications?’
    1. Yes, OMS Upgrade Analytics will also help you analyze your applications
  4. Is OMS Microsoft’s Operations Management Suite?
    1. Yes, for more information check https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/operations-management-suite/operations-management-suite-overview
  5. BIOS Firmware updates have been a challenge for me. UEFI security updates are released often. How do you keep up with these updates?
    1. We normally address this during our Windows 10 servicing projects. Not saying we always upgrade, but we always evaluate.
  6. What is the best way to update drivers to already deployed machines? With Win7 we have tried using the DPinst.exe, but I have seen for Win10 that DPinst.exe has gone away and that we are supposed to use windows update.  How do we get drivers for our model machines through WSUS and ConfigMgr?
    1. Take a look at these blog posts from Mike Terrill https://miketerrill.net/2017/09/10/configuration-manager-dynamic-drivers-bios-management-with-total-control-part-1/
  7. what are you doing or recommending for 3rd party, non-MS updates? Are you using SCCM deploy or another solution
    1. We use SVM from Flexera to manage our 3rd party updates – https://www.flexera.com/enterprise/products/software-vulnerability-management/software-vulnerability-manager/
  8. my biggest complaint is the junk that MS preloads on win10, including in-place upgrades (1607 to 1709 for example).  is there a simple way to prevent OneDrive from reinstalling on an upgrade?
  9. Is there a good guide anywhere on how to put together an Upgrade Task Sequence lets say form 1703 to 1709?
    1. There are lots of resources “out there”,  we also cover this in our Mastering/Advanced ConfigMgr training classes.
  10. Are we able to manage branch (Semi-Annual & Targetted) within SCCM instead of GPO?
    1. Anything that you can configure with a GPO can also be configured with Configuration Items in ConfigMgr.
  11. What product is that displaying the compliance figures?
    1. The Insight Analytic dashboard shown is a service provided by CTGlobal ctglobalservices.com/ctglobal-insight-analytics/ the service will provide you insight to all data in Configuration Manager and Intune/Azure AD – you can request a free trial on the website
  12. Any suggestions you have with increasing your percentage of Active Clients would be helpful. I have that challenge as well
    1. Yes, first get some insight to how may clients are inactive and why they are inactive. Second, look at implementing a solution like the Cloud Management Gateway (CMG).
  13. Yikes. Is this your REAL dashboard or just a sample?
    1. Smile We don’t want to demo something that is all “green “ and 100% compliant……….that’s not really what the real world looks like
  14. we’ve actually found that if you delete/rename anything in windows\systemapps (such as xbox) it actually BREAKS patches – they won’t install till you replace what you del/ren
    1. Don’t delete stuff, rather uninstall/remove the feature
  15. How do you limit the deployments of an application for an SCCM collection ?
    1. The Application model do have support for Global Conditions (aka Requirement rules), those can be used to limit the scope.
  16. question: what is the best way to check which Feature do we have already enabled on Windows 10 (1703) and which Features will be (1709) enabled? Like a compare
    1. PowerShell
  17. would love to see an easy way to make collections based on which build and PATCH each machine has… ie 1607 w/ .1944 (december) I’m interested in using the Upgrade Analytics of OMS in our organization. 
    1. You can create baselines based on patch compliance, and create collections based on the deployment (compliant/non-compliant)
  18. Do we need to implement Azure in order to take advantage of OMS?
    1. Yes
  19. One thing that also came up in our Windows 10 deployment is version of Feature Update we have…we have a mix of 1607 and 1703, however SCCM CB (Latest release) doesn’t have a way to identify the feature update version (if 1607 or 1703) there is a registry key however it doesn’t get collected standard by SCCM