Recast’s Endpoint Management Recap – August 2020

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Welcome to the  Recast Endpoint Management Recap, August 2020 by Gary Blok

Thanks for checking out the August edition of our recap. As always, the layout to the post:

• Events / Conference News
• Microsoft Product Announcements
• Hardware Vendor Updates (Tools / Security / Features)
• Community Tools / News
• Recast Updates

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.

Events & Conferences

Upcoming Events:

• [Community Event] Swedish Windows Virtual Desktop user group (2020.09.02) [Tweet]
• [Community Event] Summer Edition Evening MC2MC (2020.08.27)
• [MS Event] Microsoft Ignite (September 22-24)
• [PowerShell.org Events] The Calendar of events, several coming up.. Bookmark the page.
• [Training (Paid)] Mastering Configuration Manager with Johan Arwidmark and Kent Agerlund (Options: Jun 15, Aug 31, Nov 2)
• [Training (Paid)] Workplace Ninja Virtual Edition 2020 (2020.08.25)
• [Previous Event: Recordings] Microsoft Inspire.
• [Previous Event: Recordings] HD recordings available for our recent event #EEMUG – Adapting the Modern Workplace (Tweet)

Training Resources:

• [Free] Windows 10 Deployment Guide & Newsletter (deploymentresearch.com)
• If anyone has anything else you think would be of value to the community, let me know on twitter and I’ll add it here.

User Groups:

I’ve removed the detailed list of User Groups this month, if you’re new here and want to get a list of groups to follow on Twitter, hit up the previous month’s Recap.

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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.

‍Products:

Microsoft Edge Browser (Based on Chromium Engine): [Landing Page][What’s New Page]

• Microsoft Edge enterprise roadmap and release schedule

Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection – [Landing Page] [Resource Hub]

Microsoft 365 [Landing Page] [Roadmap] [Tech Community] [Youtube Channel]

• 9 Back to School Updates for OneNote and Class Notebooks – August 2020

‍ConfigMgr [What’s New Page] [Tech Community]

• 2006 Fast Ring – The “Work from Home” Edition. Coded while the devs were working from home,
•   Lots of Cloud Features and CMG related enhancements, but they even included some OSD stuff to improve deployments.
•   More love for the Community Hub! [MEMCM – Community Hub Getting Started](Jordan Benzing – @JordanTheITguy)

ConfigMgr Tech Preview [What’s New Page]

• TP 2008 – I’m always amazed what they can add each month, a couple of my favorites:
•  Analyze SetupDiag errors for feature updates
•   Collection evaluation view – There are quite a few things around this and it’s worth a look at the docs

Intune [What’s New Page] [Tech Community]

Windows 10 [Landing Page] [Tech Community][Release Information]

• Quick Tip, a dashboard of all the known patch issues for each build [MS Docs]
• What’s New for IT Pros – Win 10 2004
• Windows 10, version 20H2 available for commercial pre-release validation
• What’s new in Windows Store Client – See what’s new, including changes to use the same underlying RDP core engine as the iOS, macOS, and Android clients

Security Alerts [Microsoft Security Portal – Security Update Guide]

• Microsoft Patches for Active Exploit of IE (CVE-2020-1380) Windows (CVE-2020-1464)
• How to organize your security team: The evolution of cybersecurity roles and responsibilities

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Hardware Vendor Updates

I’m only listing changes. If you want a more complete list of their tools, check out previous month’s posts.

HP

• [Enterprise Tools Landing Page] [Community / Blog Site]
• HP Image Assistant 5.0.2
•   Adds SoftPaq View in Analyze Image recommendations.
•   Added “/LogFolder:” command line option to specify where to save the reference files as a zip file. If the /Debug command line option is specified, the debug log will be stored in the specified path.
•   Fixes miscellaneous issues.
•   Removed Migrate OS function.
• HP Manageability Integration Kit 4.1.4.1
• Updated the HPIA Repo Downloader script (including the ability to show what the IP connections the sync command has at HP – useful for troubleshooting needs)

Directly from HP:

• We are seeing some notebooks that are left plugged in 24×7 while customers are working from home, that it is negatively impacting the battery. We implemented a charging algorithm in BIOS under the “Battery Health Manager” setting. The default for any recent BIOS is “Let HP manage my battery charging” This setting engages the algorithm that will generally prevent battery damage from being plugged in all the time.

• For our customers there are 2 actions they can take :
•  Update their BIOS. New BIOS versions have better versions of this algorithm that will make the user experience much better and prevent damage to the battery.
•   Deploy the setting if they do not wish to update BIOS. If this setting does not exist, on older systems it may be set to “maximize battery life” which will allow for 100% charging 24×7 and is generally not what you want if you are keeping the system plugged in all the time.

• Tip: Use HPCMSL to manage the setting: Get-HPBIOSSettingValue -Name “Battery Health Manager”
• !!Blog Post from HP with more info an how-to on resolution!!

Dell

• [Enterprise Tools Landing Page]
• Dell Command Update (DCU) Updated to 3.1.3 – Latest versions addressed some minor bugs but should still help improve the overall experience.
• Additionally, there are some additional resources in the form of how to videos. The first set of videos have been released for DCU and can be found onDell.com/Command or via Dell’s client management playlist on Youtube.
• The system specific driver pack pages went through a bit of a facelift to improve usability for customers searching for the appropriate drivers. This change should help make the process of finding the specific packs quite a bit easier.

Lenovo

• [Enterprise Tools Landing Page][Blog Site]

Microsoft [Surface]

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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.

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Podcasts / Blog Series / Video Blogs‍

• [Documentation Series] Beyond the MS Docs, a ConfigMgr overview, starting with Task Sequence Steps in depth (Gary Blok @gwblok)
• [Youtube Channel] Intune Training Series [@OnPremCloudGuy & @AdamGrossTX]
• [PodCast] Latest Episode  (Couple of Jerks @JustJerksPod) – Just a Couple of Jerks takes us into the IT community to meet the individuals out there who are helping others and sharing their solutions and ideas.
• [Video Series] Video Tutorial: Introduction – Applications in MEMCM (Steve Rachui @steverac)
• [Youtube Channel] Just an Ephing Minute (Ryan Ephgrave MVP @EphingPosh) [www.ephingadmin.com]
• [Website Rename] ConfigMgrFTW -> MEMFTW (Jason Sandys @JasonSandys) [Tweet]

Blog Posts

 Cloud Tech

• [Blog Post] Endpoint Analytics: Find devices not enrolled with Windows Hello for Business (Martin Bengtsson @mwbengtsson)
• [Blog Post] CMG and VPN split tunneling (Steve Thompson @Steve_TSQL)
• [Blog Post] Using Endpoint Analytics for auditing your antivirus products across your on-premises and cloud managed estates (Maurice Daly MVP @modaly_it)
• [Blog Post] Proactive Battery Replacement with Endpoint Analytics (Maurice Daly MVP @modaly_it)
• [Blog Post] Co-Management Workloads – What Do They Mean To Me: Windows Update Policies (Nathan Ziehnert @theznerd)

General ConfigMgr

• [Blog Post] Step-by-Step SCCM/MEMCM 2006 Upgrade Guide (Benoit Lecours @benoitlecours)
• [Blog Post] How can we utilize the BitLocker Management feature during OSD with Endpoint Manager (Niall C. Brady@ncbrady)
• [Blog Post] How can I replace anexpired IIS certificate in a PKI enabled ConfigMgr environment (Niall C. Brady@ncbrady)
• [Blog Post] Analyze SetupDiag errors for Feature Updates in ConfigMgr 2008 Technical Preview (Adam Gross @AdamGrossTX)
• [Tweet] Community Sharing @AdamGrossTX and @panusaukko have added some #CMPivot queries
• [Blog Post] Community Hub Getting Started (Jordan Benzing – MVP @JordanTheITguy)
• [Blog Post] SCCM/MEMCM Client Command List – Manage your clients remotely (NickPilon @NickPilon)
• [Blog Post] Apply drivers compressed with WIM during OSD with Configuration Manager (Martin Bengtsson MVP @mwbengtsson)
• [Blog Post] Deploy Microsoft 365 Apps with “no content” (Sandy Zeng MVP @sandy_tsang)
• [Blog Post] (Katy Nicholson @coaster_katy) – A blog I came accross this month and Katy has been busy!
•  Enabling BitLocker with MEMCM
•   Deploying OS Task Sequences Without PXE
•   MEMCM Support Centre
•   Automated shutdown of devices
•   Environment variables
•   Wake on LAN revisited
•   UEFI Network Boot Across Subnets
•   Delving into the “Last PXE Advertisement” flag
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 Other SysAdmin Goodies

• [Blog Post] Write code faster with #Microsoft Visual Studio Code and the Error Lens extension! (Trevor Sullivan @pcgeek86)
• [Blog Post] Windows 10 Deployment Upgrade Process Logs for SCCM Admins (Anoop C Nair @anoopmannur)
• [Blog Post] PowerShell AppDeployment Toolkit Write Up with Examples (Deploymentshare@deploymentshare)
• [Blog Post] Preparing devices for Back-To-School in a Remote Learning World: Part 1
• [Blog Post] Migrate all your distributions to WSL2 at once with PowerShell {WSL2} (Damien Van Robaeys MVP] @syst_and_deploy)
• [Blog Post] PowerShell & WPF:Display alert bar in your application (Damien Van Robaeys MVP] @syst_and_deploy)

Tool Updates

• OSD Builder Updated! Support Windows 10 version 2004 & a couple bug fixes
• WIM Witch 2.3.1 Released on PowerShell Gallery (Donna Ryan MVP @TheNotoriousDRR)
• The (G)UI++ Alpha is here! [GitHub] (Nathan Ziehnert @theznerd)
• The ConfigMgr Hydration Kit, an automated lab setup, updated for ConfigMgr 2002, and Windows ADK 10 2004
• Wimlib is able to create wims over unc path and can use compression [Twitter Convo]
• Modern Driver Management now uses AdminService and supports Cloud Management Gateway
• TS Background Updated! completely new tool “Reboot Watcher” (Johan @josch62)
• MS PowerToys [GitHub] Lots of Bug Fixes
• Windows Universal Drivers [GitHub] – All the thoughts I have spinning in my head about installing Universal Windows Drivers (Mikko Järvinen @mikko_jarvinen)

Recast Software Updates‍

• Watch our most recent webinar: Enterprise Tour
• [Blog Post] Community Influencer Highlights – Maurice Daly
• [Event (free)] We are happy to sponsor Workplace Ninja’s Virtual Edition 2020 event from August 25-27, 2020, we hope you can join us

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

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