Providing your users with a centralized and user-friendly way to report phishing, junk, and non-junk emails is a great quality-of-life improvement for everyone.
In this post, I’ll cover step-by-step how to deploy the Microsoft Report Message add-in for Microsoft Outlook with Microsoft 365.
With the release of geoSCOUT version 9.0 geoLOGIC has upgraded the geoSCOUT launcher. As part of the upgrade process to version 9.0, you should be upgrading the geoSCOUT launcher as geoSCOUT users will get a warning message stating that they need the new launcher. They can still use geoSCOUT even if the launcher isn’t upgraded but they will keep seeing the warning message every time they open geoSCOUT.
The geoSCOUT launcher upgrade can be a challenging task in a large environment when users don’t have local admin. In this post, I’ll detail what I’ve discovered about how the geoSCOUT launcher works and include a PowerShell script to upgrade the launcher.
The geoSCOUT launcher seems to work by looking for a user’s GMAP.ini file saved in the user’s %AppData%, if that file isn’t present then the launcher will throw an error.
When you install geoSCOUT using the Desktop_Build_NonAdmin installer or the Desktop_Build installer both of them use the context of the path that executed the install to populate the user’s GMAP.ini file saved in %AppData%.
My theory on how part of the geoSCOUT launcher works is that it uses the user’s GMAP.ini file to find the geoSCOUT server and for version 8 it loads gsmainV8.exe from the Programs directory in the geoSCOUT network location.
The geoSCOUT version 9.0 launcher seems to work the same way as the version 8 launcher did except that instead of launching gsmainV8.exe it launches gsmap.exe. Technically speaking you could run geoSCOUT by just launching gsmap.exe but that isn’t the recommended way.
After the geoSCOUT upgrade to version 9.0 if a user is using a shortcut to gsmainV8.exe they will get the warning that their launcher is out of date and needs to be upgraded even if their geoSCOUT launcher has been upgraded on their system.
The way the geoSCOUT launcher works is important because it shows us that unlike the normal geoSCOUT user install the path you use to install the launcher doesn’t matter.
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By default, Windows servers display lots of details when you logon to them and rarely leave you wondering what it’s doing. A while back I ran into an issue that was causing 15 minute login times when a user would log in to the computer for the first time. This was particularly a problem with shared systems like meeting room computers as many users may have never logged into that computer before. The problem scales with the more meeting rooms you have and the more users you have, and typically people are rushing for meetings and don’t have time to wait for a long Windows login process.
From the user’s perspective, it looks like the computer would just sit at Welcome for 15 minutes. Yes, you can go dig into the event logs and see what’s causing that or you could make it so the computer can output what it’s doing, making it so the users can provide you with more useful information.
To do this you need to enable verbose statuses. This is enabled by default on Windows servers but not regular Windows devices. When a regular Windows device logins in and sits at the Welcome message it is doing stuff but not telling you what it’s doing.
In this post, I will detail step-by-step how to enable the Windows verbose login status with a GPO or Intune.
A while back I saw someone’s computer that had a company logo in the Windows taskbar; it looked super slick. I wanted to duplicate the same thing in my setup.
The documentation on what causes a company logo to show up in the search box in the Windows taskbar and the Windows start menu is kind of lacking however, after playing around I figured it out. It’s the custom default theme in Microsoft 365 that will cause the organization logo to show up on Windows devices connected to a Microsoft 365 tenant be it joined or just registered devices.
In this post, I will show step-by-step how to add a custom default theme to your Microsoft 365 tenant that will also apply to the search box in the taskbar of Windows devices. This works on Windows 10 and Windows 11.
I’m a big fan of using copy paste as it helps me reduce typos and allows me to paste links or other information quickly between systems. Previously I wrote a post that covers how to enable copy paste with VMRC (VMware Remote Console) however that’s not super useful for the users that are using Omnissa Horizon (formerly VMware Horizon). If you want to know how to enable copy paste with VMRC you can read my post about it called VMware Copy Paste Enabler.
The default configuration of VMware Horizon is that copy paste only works in one direction. You can paste items into VMware Horizon but you can’t copy items out, from an end-user perspective they may report that as broken. Thankfully there’s an easy way to enable full copy paste in both directions in Omnissa Horizon.
In this post, I will detail step-by-step how to enable copy paste in both directions in VMware Horizon.
Here’s how to deploy the VMware Horizon GPO Templates.
The process detailed below works perfectly on Windows 11 however, on Windows 10 the process below will lock the Start Menu layout preventing users from being able to pin anything to the Windows 10 Start Menu or change anything in the Start Menu. The process to fix this is to also deploy a default Windows 10 Start Menu the process for the fix is detailed in my post Intune Deploy Windows 10 Default Start Menu.
Deploying the same taskbar to all users is a very nice quality of life improvement, as it can help eliminate the problems of users using Windows Mail instead of the already installed Microsoft Outlook.
I opted to deploy a standard default taskbar using Microsoft Intune as Microsoft Office is a required application on all Intune systems in my setup so I didn’t need to worry about a system trying to pin Microsoft Outlook when it wasn’t installed.
In this post, I’ll show you step-by-step how to create the taskbar XML file and how to deploy it to Windows 10 and Windows 11 using Microsoft Intune.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<LayoutModificationTemplate
xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/Start/2014/LayoutModification"
xmlns:defaultlayout="http://schemas.microsoft.com/Start/2014/FullDefaultLayout"
xmlns:start="http://schemas.microsoft.com/Start/2014/StartLayout"
xmlns:taskbar="http://schemas.microsoft.com/Start/2014/TaskbarLayout"
Version="1">
<CustomTaskbarLayoutCollection>
<defaultlayout:TaskbarLayout>
<taskbar:TaskbarPinList>
<taskbar:UWA AppUserModelID="Microsoft.MicrosoftEdge_8wekyb3d8bbwe!MicrosoftEdge" />
<taskbar:DesktopApp DesktopApplicationLinkPath="%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\System Tools\File Explorer.lnk" />
</taskbar:TaskbarPinList>
</defaultlayout:TaskbarLayout>
</CustomTaskbarLayoutCollection>
</LayoutModificationTemplate>
Code language: HTML, XML (xml)We will need to make some changes as it isn’t perfect. We will start by telling Windows to unpin all the default pinned apps.
<CustomTaskbarLayoutCollection> to be <CustomTaskbarLayoutCollection PinListPlacement="Replace"> Even though we configure the taskbar XML to replace the default pinned apps this has no impact on the apps the user has pinned, it may move the items to the start of the taskbar if they have them pinned further down but that’s it.
Now we can start adding the pinned apps we want. I like to have Edge, File Explorer, and Outlook pinned.
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In this post, I will detail step-by-step how to install the Omnissa Horizon (formerly VMware Horizon) GPO templates.
Technically speaking you can fully use Horizon without any of the GPO templates however there are a lot of useful settings in them that you can configure.
Before installing the Horizon GPO templates I recommend you create a Central Store. Here’s how to Create Active Directory Central Store.
I recommend making a note that you’ve added an extra GPO template to the Central Store.
I’ve been a fan of LAPS for a while and in 2023 Microsoft made LAPS even better by introducing a new version called Windows LAPS. Windows LAPS (Local Administrator Password Solution) is a great tool for managing your local admin passwords.
You might be thinking it’s ok I use one complicated password for my local admin accounts, it does not matter in fact it’s worse because if that local admin password hash is obtained then techniques such as pass-the-hash could be used or the password could be cracked and then all systems are compromised, it also sticks out on a penetration test.
Let’s be real, how often are you really changing those passwords even if they are all unique? Well, it doesn’t matter now because Microsoft has made managing all of it much simpler.
LAPS is not new, it has been around for years. In the past to use LAPS you needed to install a small client on the systems you wanted to manage with LAPS. You also needed to install the LAPS UI to retrieve the password or go digging in the AD attributes for the password.
After April 2023 all of that has changed as with the April 2023 security update systems running Windows 10 or newer and servers running Windows Server 2019 or newer now support Windows LAPS natively. No more extra programs are needed. There’s really no excuse for not using Windows LAPS.
The old way of doing Microsoft LAPS with the small client and LAPS UI is now called Legacy LAPS.
Here is step-by-step how to deploy Windows LAPS after the April 2023 update in on-premises Active Directory setup.
get-command -module LAPS
In this post I’ll show you step-by-step how to install the VMware Horizon Connection Server on-premises specifically version 2303 (other versions will follow a very similar process).
Recently I needed to expand a disk on a Windows 10 VM and a Windows Server 2022 VM, but I couldn’t because the Recovery Partition was in the way.
When searching for a way to do this I discovered that the internet is full of posts about simply deleting the Windows Recovery Partition. I am not a fan of simply deleting a recovery tool. On numerous occasions the recovery partition has been instrumental in helping me to fix a system.
If you search for how to move the Windows Recovery Partition the internet has many posts of fake ways to do it or ways to do it with third-party tools like GParted. I have nothing against third-party tools or GParted and I don’t doubt some of those methods do work. The issue I have with those methods is that you have to take the system offline in order to do them or the tools cost money.
Now yes you could just delete the Windows Recovery partition, but before you do that make sure you understand that you will lose a bunch of recovery options. You can read more about the recovery options you’ll lose in an earlier post I made about the Windows Recovery Partition.
Here’s how to correctly move the Windows Recovery Partition on a Windows server or a normal Windows system.
This is what my partitions look like in Disk Management.
We will move the 1 GB recovery partition to the end of the disk allowing us to add the 50 GB of unallocated space to the C drive.
