Todays the day - Windows 10

Whats new thats actually interesting?

The start menu is back - WooHoo.  Well sorta woohoo, it needs some serious work to stop it being annoying with all the metro/modern apps on it and the all apps thing being very very messy, but other than that its all good
Cortana like google now only not quite there yet. Watch this space
Edge a new browser - FINALLY. Work to be done but its a start and now maybe we can convince our clients to ditch IE6/8
Disk Performance counters in task manager. Hoo-Flippin-Ray! Been wanting this for a very very long time.
Copy and Paste in command prompt.Which is great but you should be using powershell!
Multiple Desktops/Workspaces. I am actually a fan of this thanks to Linux but I doubt it will get heavily used.
Windows Hello - Not at all sure about this one.
Its free - Not interesting if you work in IT


BTW it pink screened my ESX 5.1 hosted on a Dell 2950 when I started deploying through SCCM 2012. Had to upgrade to 6. It was about time I did that anyway

In Windows ever continuing desire to become linux.......

Heres the latest salvo from powershell 5 preview 2

"A new module, PackageManagement, lets you discover and install software packages on the Internet. The PackageManagement (formerly known as OneGet) module is a manager or multiplexer of existing package managers (also called package providers) to unify Windows package management with a single Windows PowerShell interface.

A new module, PowerShellGet, lets you find, install, publish, and update modules and DSC resources on the PowerShell Gallery, or on an internal module repository that you can set up by running the Register-PSRepository cmdlet."

I wonder if this will work soon......
dpkg -i windows-core.10.0-1.deb 
or even
apt-get install windows10*

In other news at least one person in Redmond has a sense of humour

Long time no blog!
I have been ridiculously busy at my new post, 70+hrs a week busy.
I will however be adding bi-weekly updates or aide-memoirs from now on.
I am currently working for Leighton's on an SCCM 2007 and 2012 project with lots of complications, I am managing 5 separate SCCM environments across 2 domains and a single forest in an extremely unclean and unloved environment (not the Leighton's one)
All that said we are starting to wind down here so I am now looking around for my next role. If anyone has an SCCM role going for a senior SCCM and desktop consultant please email me at malcolm_spiller@iprimus.com.au
In fact if you have a job for 2 SCCM people one slightly less senior all the better. :-)

Windows 8 Consumer preview

Soooo.
Lots of stuff happening whilst I have been busy finishing an SOE project and being forced to work fixing some odd Citrix printing problems
MDT2012, SCCM beta2, Windows 8 Consumer preview......
Today I took the brave/stupid/dangerous? step of 'upgrading' my personal laptop to Win8 CP.
The jury is still out for me with Windows 8 but chances are we are going to have to get used to it. So what the hey
So far so good. A quick high level overview...
The upgrade went very smoothly, I took the option of keeping all my settings, apps etc rather than a clean install just to see how it went. It took about 1.5 hours on an i7(not SB) with 16GB of ram and a 7200rpm laptop drive. The source distribution was on the same physical disk (different partition) as the install. All hardware is working properly as it seems are most of the apps and my settings. This is good news for IT departments and bad news for consultants like me.... Still I am sure there will be no shortage of money making opportunities here.
It did take a further 1 hour for the disk to stop being accessed before I logged in, presumably anti-virus/defender/indexing etc activity but there was no reason to wait I could have logged straight in.
Only real problem I have had so far is that this

happened when I logged in with my domain admin account.  Now as far as I know this account has never been used in Japan, never had Japanese settings put on it or had anything Japanese related done to it. So how I ended up with this I do not know.

All of your existing apps will not appear in the start screen but they are easy to get to by typing a couple of letters of the name of the app in question and selecting from the list. I think people will get used to this idea pretty quickly, its arguably quicker and easier than navigating menus looking for a utility or app. Where its not good obviously is if you don't know the name of the app or if you are looking for something on a system,

There is also a high level overview available if you do get to the stage, which is likely, of having a lot of apps on your metro start page. You can select and zoom into any of the 'blocks' of apps on this screen or scroll along with the bars at the bottom if you get to that stage

I would still like to see pages on the metro screen so you can have a page of games, one of business apps, one of utilities etc etc.

I like this idea, could be great for native Win8 Apps in a locked down environment or even possibly so you can watch an IM whilst playing an online game. These 2 are the native remote desktop and the native mail app.

One thing I am really not too sure about though is the number of things that require an MS account of one kind or another to access, ignoring for a minute the ability to link your domain account to a personal Microsoft account (please take this away for the pro versions Microsoft, pretty please) and the fact that you can actually use a personal web account to log on altogether - you deserve everything that happens if you do that to an account you care about.... There are 22 apps on the initial screen 11 of them which is half, require a web account of some kind.

And I am really not sure about this.... I would assume that you can switch all this stuff off for professional deployments. Will find out later on when I have played with the latest MDT and SCCM releases.

Australia at the forefront of the Microsoft world as per normal  **sigh** (this was the 'Finance' app)

You have been told!

Gonna be a Possie (Pom that became an Aussie)

Who'd a thunk it,
Busy job, busy life.
Not sure I remember signing up for the first one.

Anyway - I am going to be an Aussie citizen as of Australia day, Mosman cricket oval for those who want to come and throw Lamingtons or try to get me to eat vegemite (not going to happen)
On the job fromt.......
Been fixing IIS, intra/extra nets, Oracle, Car Park software (a lot more complicated than it sounds) and dealing with SQL security across freakin Cisco firewalls and harsh VLAN rules annnnnd playing with System Centre 2012 with Macs
A consultants skillset has to be wide and varied, thats for sure.
Anyway mostly been dealing with a bunch of CarParking apps, basically a project with 5 different vendors, lots of physical and unusual devices, ticket machines, 1000+ cameras, intercom systems and parking guidance lights all running MAC only access to the network. They all interact with each other and a data Warehouse. Did I mention that a lot of these devices constantly stream and record to a SAN?
Any volunteers to take over?
I thought not.
It never ceases to amaze me how different vendors can be in their approach to their work, from one mob who weren't even going to hand over software, install instructions, build docs or just about anything to another lot who have detailed instructions, requirements docs for service accounts etc, and then they have to interact with each other, ahhh what fun, did I mention they are Australian, American and German.