Monthly What's New
Recast’s Endpoint Management Recap – July 2021
Gary Blok
Welcome to the Recast Endpoint Management Recap, July 2021 – by Gary Blok.
This is the summer edition of the recap! I hope you are enjoying the summer so far and can take some time to relax and reenergize. Even though things may slow down, this issue is still BIG on content.
Recently, I checked with several vendors to see how the chip shortage was affecting them, and while I’m not going to give specifics about which vendors are doing what, I will say that vendors are being affected. It’s resulting in changes to manufacturing, changing vendors for some chips on the same models (e.g., Intel WiFi might be replaced with Broadcom) and even re-engineering the motherboard designs to reduce the amount of chips needed. All of these changes may result in updated driver packs, so if you purchased one of the first devices off of the assembly line for a specific model, you might be getting slightly different devices, even if they are the same SKU. This shouldn’t affect the management of the devices much, but it’s good to be aware of it if you have any issues down the road and need to troubleshoot. For example, your model “XYZ” devices might not be the same, so if you’re trying to reproduce an issue, you’ll want to look closely at the hardware. I highly recommend having a conversation with your vendors about changes on the platforms you’ve ordered.
Also, this month, lots of Windows 11 and Windows 365 announcements from Microsoft, and I’ve added some posts I found interesting on these topics.
Make sure to click on the quick links below to get straight to the info you need. By the way, if you’re new to this monthly post, you’ll want to look back at previous months to catch up on the latest. Have a wonderful summer!
- Events / Conference News
- Microsoft Product Announcements
- Hardware Vendor Updates (Tools / Security / Features)
- Community Tools / News
- Recast Updates
- Minnesota Microsoft 365 User Group – August 9
- Workplace Ninja Virtual Edition 2021 – Aug 31 – Sept 2
- MMS Miami – Oct 25 – 28
- Slides and Recording from Back to Basics – Windows 10 / 11 Setup Internals (Michael Niehaus and Johan Arwidmark) – July 22 FWSMUG event.
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 against COVID-19 on their Responding to COVID-19 together page.
Products:
Microsoft Edge Browser (Based on Chromium Engine): [Landing Page][What’s New Page][RoadMap Portal]
Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection – [Landing Page] [Resource Hub]
Microsoft 365 [Landing Page] [Roadmap] [Tech Community] [Youtube Channel][ODT Release]
- Another Office Deployment Toolkit Release July 12, 2021 – Version 16.0.14131.20278 (setup.exe version 16.0.14131.20278)
- Fixed an issue where RemoveMSI would fail in certain cases.
- Fixed an issue detecting concurrent executions of setup.exe.
- Reliability fixes for ARM platforms.
ConfigMgr [What’s New Page] [Tech Community] [Virtual Hub][MS Q\A][Reddit]
- CM 2103 Update Rollup: KB10036164
ConfigMgr Tech Preview [What’s New Page]
- TP 2105.2
- Windows Update native experience for software updates.
- TP 2106
- Windows 11 support.
- Implicit uninstall of applications.
- Convert CMG to VM Scale Set – Jörgen Nilsson @ccmexec.
- TP 2107? Still nothing at the time of this post’s release…, so I’d assume something is coming very soon.
Intune [What’s New Page] [Tech Community]
Windows 10 / 11 [Landing Page] [Tech Community][Release Information][PowerToys] | Windows 365
- New announcement – Windows 365, Microsoft’s Virtual Desktop in the Cloud – Available Aug. 2.
- Windows 365 / Cloud PC first takes – Michael Niehaus @mniehaus.
- Demo to Provision M365.
- Windows 10 21H2 intro.
- What’s new in Windows 11 for Universal Print
- Announcing Update Health Tools
- Evolving the Microsoft Store for Business and Education
Security Alerts and Info [Microsoft Security Portal – Security Update Guide]
I’m only listing changes. If you want a more complete list of their tools, check out the previous month’s posts.
For a full list of tools, blog posts, and information about the vendors,
** Much of this information is provided directly from the vendor, so when you see “we” think of it as, “Vendor Name,” and not Recast Software.
HP [Enterprise Tools Landing Page] [Community / Blog Site] [Outlet Site]
HPIA 5.1.2 (sp121443) was released on Friday July 16 with several fixes, including:
- Create Driver Pack issues (several).
- Better handling of returned error codes.
- Fix for missing firmware summary.
- Prevent any internet access when using /offlinemode switch.
- Changes to handle move to cloud resources instead of connecting to hp.com.
Dell [Enterprise Tools Landing Page] [Refurbished Sale Site] [Outlet Site]
- Dell released a GitHub Repo with a few PowerShell scripts for managing BIOS settings.
Lenovo [Enterprise Tools Landing Page][Blog Site]
Microsoft [Surface]
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.
Podcasts / Blog Series / Video Blogs
- [YouTube Channel] Intune Training Series [@OnPremCloudGuy and @AdamGrossTX]
- [YouTube Channel] Namaste Techies [@anoopmannur and @Hoorge]
- [YouTube Channel] ConfigurationManagerTeam
- [YouTube Channel] CloudManagement.Community [@Dean_Ellerby and @Andy_69Jones]
- Blog Series: Cloud attach – Part 8 Enabling Tenant Attach Niall C. Brady @ncbrady and Paul @SCCMentor
Blog Posts
Cloud Tech
- [Updated] Intune: Configure Printers for Non-Administrative Users – Rahul Jindal @rahulj1906
- Use Proactive remediations to report on or install the Microsoft Update Health tools – Trevor Jones @SMSagentTrevor
- Using Certificate Authentication with Graph API – Sean McAvinue @sean_mcavinue
- Comprehensive guide to managing macOS with Intune – Oliver Kieselbach @okieselb
- Enable and Configure Windows Defender Firewall rules using Intune – Rahul Jindal @rahulj1906
- Use Intune Proactive Remediation + Azure Automation + Power BI to create a report of devices local admin – Damien Van Robaeys @syst_and_deploy
- Use Azure Policy to configure Boot Diagnostics Settings – Kevin Crouch
- Setting Environmental Variables with Intune and proactive remediations – Jóhannes Geir Kristjánsson
ConfigMgr
- How to Add PowerShell Active Directory Module to WinPE (MDT) – Brooks Peppin @brookspeppin
- Adding support for OS deployment through Wi-Fi to SCCM – Andrew @AndrewZtrhgf
- Updated Section: Automatically use Wi-Fi profile from the running OS
- Update HP TPM Firmware 1.2 to 2.0 using SCCM and HP TPM Configuration Utility – Daniel Engberg @danielclasson
- Configmgr Comparison of Update Views – Christopher Kibble @Christopher83
Other SysAdmin Info
- Fixing a broken Windows Recovery partition – Katy Nicholson @coaster_katy
- A Developer’s Guide to Creating Bad Power BI Projects – Paul Turley @paul_turley
- Using the PowerShell ISE as a Remote Management Console – Jeff Hicks @JeffHicks
- Right Click Tools version 2.5 has expired. It’s 5 years old, so it is time to upgrade!
- Introducing Endpoint Insights: Taking Enhansoft to the Next Level!
- We are hiring! If you or someone you know is looking to make a huge impact at a fast-growing company, take a look at our job postings and apply today.
- Remember, if you’re an Enterprise customer, make sure you’re using the latest version of Right Click Tools.
- Follow us on Twitter @RecastSoftware to hear the latest.
Thanks for checking out this edition of Recast’s Endpoint Management Recap – July 2021, and look forward to more monthly updates of what’s going on.
