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Todd's Tips for System Adminstrators

Office 365 – Creating Custom SKUs

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If you are working with Office 365, one of the things you may need to do is provision an account with a subset of the Office 365 plans. For example, I have an E3 plan but I don’t want Skype for business or Exchange email, just Office 365 Pro Plus. (Why you would buy E3 when there is a ProPlus SKU, I don’t know but I’ve had to do this twice this month).

Making a custom plan is pretty straight forward.

First you need to get the account SKUs.

Get-MsolAccountSKu | fl

From there you will see all your SKUs. Use this to get its components:

$ServicePlans = Get-MsolAccountSku | Where {$_.SkuPartNumber -eq “{SkuPartNumber}”}

List the components using $ServicePlans.

Finally make your custom SKU by running:



$MyO365SKU = New-MsolLicenseOptions -AccountSkuId company:EnterprisePack -DisabledPlans Exchange_S_Enterprise,FLOW_O365_P2,POWERAPPS_O365_P2,TEAMS1,PROJECTWORKMANAGEMENT,INTUNE_O365,YAMMER_ENTERPRISE,RMS_S_ENTERPRISE,MCOSTANDARD,SHAREPOINTWAC,SHAREPOINTENTERPRISE,SWAY,Deskless


Replace company:EnterprisePack with your own SKU and you are off to the races. Final command is to assign it.


Set-MsolUserLicense -UserPrincipalName $upn -AddLicenses company:EnterprisePack -LicenseOptions $MyO365SKU


Set-MsolUserLicense -UserPrincipalName $upn -AddLicenses company:EnterprisePack -LicenseOptions $MyO365SKU


A great walk through can be found at http://exitcodezero.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/how-to-assign-selective-office-365-license-options/comment-page-1/


 


Deploying Windows to the Correct Drive in Configuration Manager


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I was helping a customer deploy Windows 7 to a bunch of workstations recently. Yes, some customers continue to use it. One of the weird things you will have happen when installing Windows 7 from retail media to a machine in a System Center Configuration Manager deployment task sequence is the operating system (OS) drive will be D: instead of C:. It can very odd when you encounter it and if you have Line Of Business software that needs C: drive then you could be in trouble. Besides, who wants their OS on Drive D:? That’s just silly.


This is a known issue which is caused when the operating system was captured from the D: drive originally. In the case of the RTM Windows 7, it was captured from drive D:. Fortunately the fix is very simple when using System Center Configuration Manager 2012.


In System Center Configuration Manager, add a task variable called OSDPreserveDriveLetter and set the value to false. I’ll add a screenshot when I can to this. (Note to self, ask Garth for a screenshot. 😉 )


If you’ve used Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, you never had to do this as MDT just works properly. Its one of the reason’s you will see people use MDT to capture their image and then they import it over to System Center Configuration Manager environment.


Surface Pro 4, Surface Dock and DVI Problems


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I’ve been working at a customer back in the fall who was were planning to deploy 60 Surface Pro 3 devices running Windows 8.1 Enterprise (they had been sitting on them a bit) along with the Surface dock and external monitors and network connections. We had some issues to work through and here is my learning.


When unboxing the current round of Surface Pro 4, they don’t detect the Surface Dock. It flashes on the power adapter and then turns off. I created a guide for those setting these devices up.


First you want to boot into Windows on the device. Adjust the date and time, especially if you are using System Center Configuration Manager to deploy the operating system to the tablet. Next, you should have downloaded the drivers for the tablets from Microsoft. If you haven’t here is the link to the Surface Drivers https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/download/details.aspx?id=38826


Next install the firmware updater and and the drivers. Don’t worry that you are going to be reloading the operating system on it. Once this is complete, reboot and go into the BIOS. You can now change the boot order so the the USB device is first in boot order (or PXE if you use that instead). Select this save, and with your boot stick plugged in, reboot.


You don’t have a boot stick? No worries, go into configuration manager, add the Surface Pro 3 drivers and create a boot stick. I make sure all surface drivers (not just network and storage) are on the stick as it seems to do more and work better for these tablets. The experience around Surface Pro 4 drivers seems to be better. (I just use Network and Storage on Surface Pro 4 with Windows 10, no issues)


Using the boot stick, boot up and the machine will reboot on its own a couple of times, but now the new surface dock will work with the device. It won’t recognize the dock before the firmware is updated. The docking station does seem to work fine.


The next issue we found was not all cables are the same. The mini display port to DVI cables didn’t work with the dock but do work with the Surface Pro 3. Apparently there is an active cable or passive cable. We had passive and the dock didn’t work with them but it works fine with an active cable.


For those of you deploying Surface Pro devices, I hope this helps if you are stuck. Feel free to reach out if stuck.