Welcome to the Recast Endpoint Management Recap, Holiday edition (November + December) 2020 by Gary Blok
Hi Bloggers! If you're in the community and you're blogging things, feel free to send me a DM or tag me in your twitter post when you tweet your latest blog post so I know it's out there. I browse twitter fairly regularly, but I'm sure I still miss a lot of great content being created. If you've started blogging and it never shows up on my list, hit me up! @gwblok
Thanks for checking out the Holiday edition of our recap. As always, the layout to the post:
That's the idea, a high level overview of things going on that you'll want to be aware of and you can dig into them further on your own. If you're new to this monthly post, you'll want to look back at previous months, so much great content.
This was a great live event, the ConfigMgr team brought some highlights of things to come, and there was a great "Happy Hour" time we were could chat up other community members, along with David James and others.
NWSCUG | TCSMUG | AZSMUG Combo Group: had a great session, Mike Marable covered how he moved from Task Sequences to Native Features Updates in CM... why? necessity. More stuff was covered, but honestly, I found that to be pretty cool. Still waiting on the slide deck and recoding to be posted, so check back often. [NWSCUG Site]
Microsoft is sponsoring Microsoft 365 workshops for eligible customers [Workshop Link]
Microsoft Products & Announcements
Microsoft has posted a page with a lot of great resources during this time, to help IT professionals, Educators, Families, and Remote Business, along with how Microsoft is helping in the battle on Covid-19 on their Responding to COVID-19 together page.
Windows Update will start automatically updating HP System BIOS in Jan 2021. [WhitePaper]
You can already get BIOS updates by manually checking for updates, but soon, they will automatically update when it meets criteria. Check out that whitepaper to learn more.
[Blog Post] Secure BIOS with HP Sure Admin and CMSL : A review of how to implement password-less BIOS protection with HP’s Sure Admin certificate-based technology
Commercial Vantage provides a user interface for changing hardware settings, running diagnostic scans, checking for Lenovo software and driver updates, and more. Commercial Vantage is a slimmed-down and customizable version of Lenovo Vantage which has been available in the Microsoft Store since December 2017
From the Surface Team: We'll likely be releasing firmware and drivers for some products this month, but nothing major. The only thing I'd say is "happy holidays" 🙂.
Community Tools \ Blogs
One more note, I do my best to provide Twitter accounts with the blog posts, both to provide credit where credit is due, and so you can then follow them yourselves to stay in the loop as things are coming out and ideas are being discussed on twitter.
CM Architecture Visio Template [Blog] [GitHub] (Anoop C Nair @anoopmannur)
CMPivot Queries [GitHub] (Merlin from Belgium @MerlinFromBE)
Windows 10 Toast Notification Script Update: Second action button and built-in prevention from disabling toast notifications [Blog] (Martin Bengtsson @mwbengtsson)
Watch for more content and new Right Click Tools features coming soon next month. From all of us at Recast software, we wish you a safe and wonderful holiday season and a bright 2021 ahead!
Thanks for checking out the post, and look forward to more monthly updates of what's going on. If you think we missed something, or want any other news added, find us on Twitter: @RecastSoftware