All what you learned in this field can and will be used with Windows 7 and MDT 2010. This is great. And with nice improvements!. I grabbed what was most interesting to me from the Windows System Deployment blog:

• ImageX and its underlying infrastructure, which is used to manage Windows Image (WIM) format images, now allows multiple images to be modified simultaneously, supports interim saves and with a newly re-written underlying supporting architecture for mounting and manipulating images, is more robust than in Windows Vista.. The extensible infrastructure (WIMGAPI) and supporting mount capabilities are now included in every Windows edition.
• Using Diskpart, you can mount a VHD offline and service that VHD using the servicing tools (just like you can with WIM).
• · We consolidated a number of offline management tools (including pkgmgr.exe and intlcfg.exe) into a single tool, known as DISM (Deployment Image Servicing and Management). DISM also supports more features and functionality than it did in Windows Vista, including logging, inventory commands with parsable output, detailed help, offline INF driver package installation, direct application of MS update packages, and integration of international settings .
• WinPE support has changed in two ways:
• o PEImg functionality has been incorporated into DISM.
• o The PE feature package model has changed; instead of starting with an image containing all of the feature packages and then removing the ones that aren’t enabled, you start with a base image and add only the feature packages you want.
• The Windows Recovery Environment (RE) is now installed by default in Windows 7, reducing the time and effort required to get basic diagnostic and recovery capabilities into the system for no-boot situations. The customization options in the new Windows RE have also been expanded compared to Windows Vista.
• The User State Migration Tool (USMT) has several new features that improve its flexibility and performance.  The hard-link migration store significantly improves performance in refresh scenarios, offline migration enables user state capture from within Windows PE, and the document finder reduces the need for custom migration XML when capturing all user documents.  It is now distributed through the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK).
• Although not directly included in the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK), we’ve made getting the Application Compatibility Toolkit, Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, and Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkits easier by presenting links on the WAIK autorun (StartCD) page. Because these tools are often released more often, or at different times than the OS, the target pages can be updated as new versions become available.
• New features of WDS in Windows Server 2008 R2 include:

• ·Multicast with Multiple Stream Transfer allows you to set performance thresholds on multicast clients, allowing slower clients to move to slower “streams“ so that they don’t slow down your fast machines, a limitation in the original multicast feature.
• Dynamic Driver Provisioning allows drivers stored on the WDS server to be dynamically chosen at deployment time. This makes updating your images with new drivers less important (as you just add them to the store), lowering OS bloat and image maintenance costs. You can also insert drivers into boot (WinPE) images directly from the WDS driver store.
• WDS VHD Native Boot. Deploy a Windows 7-based VHD file to a machine and boot from it.

The cursor may become irritatingly slow when Track Changes is turn on and the Review ribbon is up (i.e., not minimized), but speeds up again when you leave the Review tab or the ribbon is minimized.
One work around that seems to be pretty efficient is to minimize the ribbon.
You can still access the review clicking on a tab. After you have used the tool you want, the ribbon then minimizes automatically. This not only solves the problem with slow typing, but gives you a bit more real estate on the screen.
You can minimize the ribbon by right clicking a tab and choosing "minimize ribbon." Or you can type CTRL+F1 to toggle the ribbon on or off.

Office 2007 is nice, but even with SP1, this product is just not finished!

Note that this post is provided “as is” with no warranty nor supportability engagement. It does not engage my responsibility at all.
Nevertheless if you consider this not clear, incomplete or inadequate, please let me know !

• Try to find a stand-alone installer instead of using Google Update (quite a challenge)
• Start Monitoring and just install Chrome normally
• Stay in monitoring and move the whole Google folder from the user’s AppData\Local folder to the Q: drive, e.g Q:\GChrome.010\Google
• Still in Monitoring, delete all the created Chrome shortcuts. Create a new one pointing to the Q: location.
• Edit the new chrome shortcut and add the –no-sandbox (dash dash no dash sandbox) after chrome.exe
• Launch Chrome using this shortcut.
• Close monitoring and complete your package.
• It is not necessary to create a streaming block 1 nor to configure anything, the setting will be lost.
• Save your package and publish it.

You will find detailed info on the Chromium Sandbox concept on http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/sandbox

The sequencing steps are common and straight forward. Publishing the package is easy too. But a launching on the client, PyMol stops with an error, telling that the PYMOL_PATH value could not be found in the environment nor in the registry. PyMOL installer indead creates a registry entry to store the path of the PyMOL application path in this variable. The solution is simply to reload your PyMOL project in your App-V sequencer and edit the virtual registry:

1. Go to the Virtual Registry tab
2. Under Registry\Machine\Software. create the following key hierarchy: Classes\SOFTWARE\Delano Scientific\PyMOL\PYMOL_PATH
3. Edit the Default value of the PYMOL_PATH key and enter the path to your PyMOL installation, in my case Q.\\PyMOL_1.1x\DeLano Scientific\PyMOL or %SFT_MNT%\PyMOL_1.1x\DeLano Scientific\PyMOL
4. Save your App-V PyMOL project
5. Re-publich it.

That’s it

This is probably the best place to start… Breaking news, doc white papers, best practices, links to blogs and forums, and more….

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/appvirtualization/default.aspx

Direct link to white papers:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/appvirtualization/cc843994.aspx

I was quite curious to see what a fastest and more stable browser would look like, since IE 7 is, to my humble opinion, quite fast and stable… So I was not impressed at all by the speed and stability of Chrome. What positively surprised me is the user interface which I like very much. Rendering is good and there are plenty of good ideas, such as the various tab functions ("Close tabs to the right"; "Close tabs opened by this tab"), the peaceful file download function, incognito browsing to name just some…

Since the browser is committed to simplicity, it’s missing some cool functions other browsers are offering, but nothing which is really essential.

But there is a BUT! or even more than one….

User-only installation

First the installation. Chrome installs in the local AppData of each user profile. So any user without admin rights can install the browsers. On multi-user computers, you will end with as many Chrome installations as you have users on this PC. The advantage of not needing admin rights to install Chrome is over as soon as the user needs to install a plugin, such as Flash… At this stage, admin credentials are required. Your pleased users will soon get frustrated.

User preferences

Everything is stored under C:\Users\[YourUserName]\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\ (for Vista) and C:\Documents and Settings\[YourUserName]\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\  (for XP). This means that the user settings cannot roam and are bound to the machine where they have been done. So one roaming users (such as students) will have to repeat all her Chrome settings every time they are using another PC, including the bookmarks!

Stability and security

Chrome is supposed to be extremely stable. Even if a tab content is crashing, the other open tabs should be unaffected and the browser itself should resist like a rock…
Well, try to type the two characters :% in the address bar…  
Well, it’s still a beta, isn’t it?

Sept. 19, 2008: Ok, I know, the Google guys corrected this bug in the next build, so you will probably no longer experience this nice crash…

Another concern is security… Well several posts indicate the Chrome uses a not patched Apple WebKit that make it vulnerable to Java bugs… I didn’t try to test this one

Privacy

User bookmarks and user browsing history are kept together in the history file in the …\User Data\Default\ folder. This file is a SQLite v3 database which is not manageable, unless you install SQLite browsing tools. A normal user will manage his/her bookmarks using the Chrome interface. Not a big deal. But for Google, this single database file containing both the user’s browsing history and bookmarks represents probably a huge advantage, because it can easily be consolidated and deeply analyzed if you let Google get this file. So the first setting I would configure when using Chrome is this one:

My non-concluding first impression

Google pure: cool and funny for home users
A bit perverse: Ask yourself: what is Google seeking for with Chrome…
Not a revolution, but plenty of excellent ideas; not yet suitable for roaming user, nor as a company corporate browser…

I took me a while to find out why I was not able to build working sft packages with the new App-V Sequencer 4.5 RC…

I set up a virtual vista reference machine on my Hyper-V server and installed the Sequencer 4.5 RC. The only package I was able to produce was puTTY: what a performance. The name of my VM was "soft". Than I duplicate this VM, de-installed the Sequencer 4.5 and installed the old version 4.2. With Softgrid Sequencer 4.2, I was able to sequence nearly every application. The only difference in my environment was the version of the Sequencer…

Was it really the only difference? Think "out-of-the-box"! Another fatal difference was the name of the virtual machine: Soft to Soft42.

What’s happened under the cover? When intercepting all IOs during monitoring and sequencing, App-V "anonymizes" the current user’s SID with the variable %SFT-SID% and the computer name with %COMPUTERNAME%. This happens with blind general string replacement. Thus intercepted HKLM/Software/MyApp got transformed into HKLM/%COMPUTERNAME%ware/MyApp for example. It’s funny, but of course, it’s fatal!

Can you imagine what happens if you name your Sequencing machine "App" or "Win", or even "S"? I suppose, you’ll get huge packages, but I doubt that they will work So better choose a very specific name for your App-V Sequencer machine…

Notice that the adm file is a RC version. Also the adm controls preferences (not enforced policies). And it is not (yet) an admx but an "old-fashion adm template…

You will find the official information and the connect link here: http://blogs.technet.com/softgrid/archive/2008/07/17/app-v-adm-template-now-available-on-connect.aspx

I have a lot of PowerPoint 2007 slides, and I frequently need to copy some graphics I did into Word 2007. I select the group of shapes or objects I need to copy to Word and paste them onto my Word 2007 page. Unfortunately, the object get pasted as “Microsoft Office Graphic Object” that have a very poor quality and cannot longer be edited in Word as a native drowing object. Under Paste Special, in the AS: box, the “Microsoft Office Drawing Object” format is no longer available. This makes Copy and Paste from PowerPoint 2007 to
Word 2007 totaly useless if you need quality and “editability”. The only way is to paste the whole slide as “Microsoft Office PowerPoint Slide Object”, but this is a very bad workaround, because I ususally need just a part of the slide. Under Office 2003, everything was working like a charm!

The craziest thing is that it works when pasting Word 2007 objects in Powerpoint 2007!!! If you create a text box in Word 2007 and copy/paste it in Powerpoint 2007, the obect remains a text box in Powerpoint! But in 99% of the cases, you need that in the other direction: from PowerPoint to Word. Why did Microsoft removed this essential interoperability feature????

Or am I missing something???

When launching Outlook 2007 the fisrt time for new users, a dialog box pops up asking you to confirm the user’s name and initials. Problem is, the box disappears so quickly you cannot click through it. From then on, Outlook will not work, claiming an open and unfindable dialog box. A recent Outlook patch seems to be the cause af this problem, and should be re-released in the coming weeks… Until then, an easy workaround is to configure the user’s display name and initials for Office 2007 application by lauching Word or PowerPoint. Outlook will behave correctly ofter this….

I remember a lecture (Management of Research and Creativity) where Prof. R. Boutellier explained that the successive stages of an academic career and when a scientist should gamble, and when she should do secure science… But there is another similarity between faculty and gamblers, as Derek Bok wrote in University in the Marketplace:

"Universities share on characteristic with compulsive gamblers and exiled royalty: there is never enough money to satisfy their desires."

Under XP, I used wab.exe for years as an LDAP query utility. The functions of the Windows Address Book has been enhanced with Vista, and the configuration changed quite a lot. So just follow these few steps to have a nice LDAP query utility:

1. Create a shortcut to "C:\Program Files\Windows Mail\wab.exe" /find, find a nice directory icon and place the shortcut in your Start Menu on on your Quick Launch toolbar.
2. Launch your new shortcut
3. Right click the Look in: field "Windows Contacts"…
   
4. …and choose Directory Service, then Add…, Directory Service
5. Fill in the your LDAP server information in the wizard. you can review/edit the properties of your Directory Service at any time. Here is the settings I’m using for the ETH LDAP service:
   
   

That’s it…

I couldn’t find where these settings are stored in the registry or in an XLM profile… Any idea? If yes, just post a comment…

Note that this post is provided “as is” with no warranty nor supportability engagement. It does not engage my responsibility at all.
Nevertheless if you consider this not clear, incomplete or inadequate, please let me know !

I must admit, it is much more comfortable even if it does not comply to "real men don’t click"
I can easily insert tables, lists, pictures, links, maps, and more… And there is a spell checker!!!

This is the street plan of Hönggerberg…	… the view for finger 4 of HCI. I’m working in the middle of the second flour.

The BCDEdit function used by the ZTIBCDUtility.vbs script of MDT 2008 writes an incomplete entry in the BCD file of Vista SP1. Called by LTIApply.wsf /PE after the sysprep task, this function is responsible for forcing the computer to reboot in PE in order to capture the built OS.
Because of the incomplete RAMDisk PE Entry in BCD, the computer reboots in Vista an begins minisetup instead of booting PE and capturing the image.

Fortunately, David has written as new ZTIBCDUtility.vbs script that can be downloded from his blog…

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!!!!!!! and merci Guillaume pour le tuyau!

Note that this post is provided “as is” with no warranty nor supportability engagement. It does not engage my responsibility at all.
Nevertheless if you consider this not clear, incomplete or inadequate, please let me know !

“You can only manage what you can measure” is a very famous sentence of Peter Drucker, the guru in modern management therory and also attributed to W. Edward Deming another famous management diva.
I think, it’s true for managing Toyota, Dell and for sure UBS as well. But you cannot run your family, your school, your village, or your university like General Motors! For them I prefer the quote of Albert Einstein, who said:

“Not everthing that can be counted counts,
and not everything that counts can be counted.”

When running WAIK 1.1 on a x64 Vista or x64 Windows 2008 systems, you cannot generate a catalog for a captures x86 Vista or Windows 2008.
It’s a shame, really. But there is a workaround:

1. Copy the original catalog of your Vista x86 (INSTALL_WINDOWS VISTA ENTERPRISE.CLG) from your distribution share’s original OS (Distribution\Operating Systems\OriginalVistaEntSP1x86\sources) to the folder in which your imported your captured image (\Distribution\Operating Systems\MasterVistaEntSP1x86)
2. Rename the .clg file to a name that match your customized image in the form WIMFileName_ImageName (MasterVistaEntSP1x86_BUILD-VISTASP1CDrive.CLG in my case.)
3. Launch System Image Manager (do not use the Edit Unattended.xml button of Task Sequence Properties in MDT!)
4. Open your Unattended.xml file corresponding to the deployment task sequence of your captured image (\Distribution\Control\DEPL-VISTASP1X86 in my case). Ignore errors and message about catalog.
5. In the Windows Image pane (the catalog pane), right click the Windows Vista Vista and click Close Windows Image.
6. In the empty Windows Image pane, right click, choose Select Windows Image, change the file type to .clg, browse to the Operating Systems subfolder of your captured image and select the catalog file you just renamed (MasterVistaEntSP1x86_BUILD-VISTASP1CDrive.CLG).
7. Save your answer file

Now you can open it from the Edit Unattended.xml button of Task Sequence Properties in MDT!

Note that this post is provided “as is” with no warranty nor supportability engagement. It does not engage my responsibility at all.
Nevertheless if you consider this not clear, incomplete or inadequate, please let me know !

The script LTIApply I got in the download of MDT2008 x64 has a bug, to my humble opinion:

Line 255 should read:
BackupStore oEnvironment.Item(“DestinationLogicalDrive”) & “\boot\bcd.save”
and not:
BackupStore oEnvironment.Item(“DestinationLogicalDrive”) & “\sources\bcd.save”

Without this correction, the script ZTIBackup.wsf will not fine the bcd.save to overwrite the bcd store and your capture image will always try to boot in PE!

Note that this post is provided “as is” with no warranty nor supportability engagement. It does not engage my responsibility at all.
Nevertheless if you consider this not clear, incomplete or inadequate, please let me know !

Until June 2008, I’ll have to somewhat reduce my IT activities and concentrate on thesis of my postgraduate Master in Advanced Sciences. My topic is pretty controversial one: “Resource allocation in higher education organizations”. So I will post some interesting thoughts and citations. I like this one very much:

“Education is not about filling pots. It is about lighting a fire. We are, however, very good at filling pots!” Vlado Prelog, Nobel Prize 1975, Peter Chen, Vice President of the ETH.

System state includes more data on Windows Server 2008 than in the Windows Server 2003 operating system. In Windows Server 2008, the exact system components which make up the system state depend on the configuration of the computer. System state data includes at least the following and may include additional data that is configuration dependent:

• Registry.
• COM+ class registration database.
• Boot files, including system files.
• Certificate Services database.
• Active Directory Domain Services.
• SYSVOL directory.
• Cluster Service information.
• Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) meta-directory.
• System files that are under Windows File Protection (WFP).

System state can be backed up separately at the command prompt only (using PowerShell):

Critical volumes (volumes storing system components including NTDS.dit, SYSVOL and %windir%) can be backed up. On domain controllers which are using the DFS Replication service for SYSVOL replication (i.e. Windows Server 2008 domain functional level), the DFS Replication service co-operates with Windows Server Backup in order to backup the SYSVOL folder.
There are only 2 kinds of Backup type in Windows Server 2008:

1. Full Server Backup
   A full server backup is a backup of every volume on the server.
2. Critical Volumes Backup
   Critical volumes are volumes which are required to recover Active Directory Directory Service.
   Critical volumes must include the boot-sector volume and the volumes that contain the following data:
   • Operating system files (all files in %windir%)
   • Registry
   • Ntds.dit database and log files
   • SYSVOL folders

Source: David Shen, Microsoft Online Community

Here the download site…
… and the instructions raising Hyper-V beta virtual machine to the new version.