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Office 365 – Creating Custom SKUs

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I updated this post April 7, 2020 to show some command line changes I made as my old commands for Office 365 were not working. Stay safe everyone during this Covid-19 pandemic. 

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”} | ForEach-Object ($_.ServiceStatus)

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


(Note you can add or remove from that list, whatever you need to to make it work the way you want it to. When new stuff is added to Office 365, note it is added enabled so periodically it makes sense to go through this and clean it up.


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/


Setting a Default Printer in Windows 10


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I’ve had a few people reach out to me and ask how to set a particular printer as the default.


It’s pretty straight forward.


Press the windows key and type printers. Open Printers and Scanners.


Next uncheck the box “Allow Windows to manage my default printer” (Step 1)


Then click on the printer you would like to be default. (Step 2)


Next, click Manage on that printer. (Step 3)


Printers and Scanners Screen


Finally, check the box Make Default (Step 4)


Windows 10 printer - Manage your devices


That’s it, you are finished and now have a default printer.


If you leave Windows to manage your default printer, it will use the printer you use most frequently at work and is smart enough to give you a different printer when you are at home. We’ve had some people ask for their printer to be specified directly which is why I have created this post. 




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.