Download Microsoft Ignite 2017 session content

This script can download all the Microsoft Ignite slidedecks and videos that are available from the Ignite portal. Very useful if you want to watch all the movies and sessions once again!! In this example I’ll download only the sessions with the keyword “IaaS”. But you can also download all the content, or just by title, speaker, etc.

Download the script from Microsoft Gallery here.


\Get-IgniteSession.ps1 -DownloadFolder C:\Ignite2017 -Keyword "IaaS"

How to: Removing Windows 8.1 Modern Apps with PowerShell

When you install a default Windows 8.1 machine, there’re a few modern apps available. In some environments, you want
to remove these modern apps for your users.

With the following steps, you can delete specific apps or all the modern apps.

1.) To get a overview off all the package, use the following command:
Get-AppxPackage | ft Name, PackageFullName -AutoSize
2.) Let’s remove the Finance modern app
Remove-AppxPackage -Package Microsoft.BingFinance_3.0.1.172_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe -Confirm:$false
3.) Return to the start menu and now you’ll see the Finance app is gone
4.) To remove all the modern apps, use the following command:
Get-AppxPackage | Remove-AppxPackage -Confirm:$false

2015-03-13_14h52_51    2015-03-13_15h24_13    2015-03-13_15h24_54

2015-03-13_15h25_13    2015-03-13_15h26_15    2015-03-13_15h26_25

2015-03-13_15h27_21    2015-03-13_15h27_27

How to: Remove “settings” button in Mozilla Firefox

In some scenario’s you want to remove some buttons within the options of Mozilla Firefox. Because there are not that enhanced group policies for Mozilla Firefox, you’ve to script something. In my example I’ve used RES Workspace Manager to distribute the modified files, but you can also use something else. For example: PowerShell, batchfiles or Group Policy Preferences.

You can edit the file userChrome.css in the folder AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Profiles\<nameofyourprofile>\chrome to tweak the menu settings within Mozilla Firefox. In my example I’ve added the following rule:
/* Remove connection button */
#connectionSettings { display: nome !important; }

When you open Mozilla Firefox the next time, the “Settings” is gone! 🙂

2014-12-31_09h52_20    2014-12-31_09h52_56    2014-12-31_09h56_05

2014-12-31_09h56_55   2014-12-31_09h53_55

How to: Save Windows tiles in Windows 8.1 using RES Workspace Manager 2014

Whitin Windiws 8.1 users are able to add there own Windows tiles on the start screen. Here you can create your own selection of the most used applications and group them together. When you’re usning Windows 8.1 with RES Workspace Manager 2014, you can save this layout. So after logout and login again, the layout is still there.

1.) Open the RES Workspace Manager 2014 Console
2.) Navigate to Compsotion \ User Settings
3.) Create a new setting named: Save Windows Tiles
4.) Add the following two files to be saved
%LoacalAppData%\Microsoft\Windows\appsFolder.itemdata-ms
%LoacalAppData%\Microsoft\Windows\appsFolder.itemdata-ms.bak
5.) Assign the settings to the right user(s) and Workspace
6.) Login, change your Windows tiles and logout….
7.) Browse to your PersonalSettings folder and see if there is any UPF file

2014-10-01_15h29_48    2014-10-01_16h00_58    2014-10-01_16h02_14

Can’t start Sticky Notes in Windows 8.1 with RES Workspace Manager 2014

Last week I’ve been working on a big VDI environment with RES Workspace Manager 2014, Windows 8 and VMWare Horizon View. Everything looks realy nice and is working realy well!! But I’ve seen one strange thing. One of the applications “Sticky Notes” couldn’t be started from the start menu or Windows tiles. In this blogpost you’ll find a solution for this problem.

1.) Add Sticky Notes to RES Workspace Manager 2014
2.) Open the Properties of the new application and navigate to the second tab “Settings
3.) Scroll down to “Disable file system redirector on 64-bit systems” and Enable this setting
4.) Refresh the User Workspace and start the application again
5.) Sticky Notes can now be used

2014-10-01_09h43_05    2014-10-01_09h44_20    2014-10-01_09h44_27

2014-10-01_09h44_43    2014-10-01_09h44_56    2014-10-01_09h49_04

How to: Set Microsoft Office initials with Active Directory information using RES Workspace Manager 2014

When you’ve installed Microsoft Office in your environment, the first time the user starts one of the Office products, they receive a pop-up box for the initials. Default there are two things the user has to fill in. The username and the initials. The username is the displayname within Active Directory. The initials is the first letter of the username. But, what if you want to fill this field also with some Active Directory information, like the property Initials.

In this environment I’m using RES Workspace Manager 2014, so there’re also possibilities to set some user variables in your session. First I’ve created a new environment variable with a query to read the information from Active Directory.

1.) Open the RES Workspace Manager Console and create a new environment variable. In my example it is Initials
2.) Give the new variable the following value $adinfo(Initials) There’re some more values possible, like firstname, lastname, etc….
3.) Login to your session, in my example a Windows 8.1 VDI desktop and open the command prompt
4.) Type the command set and search for the new variable Initials. It’s the information from the Active Directory
5.) Now return to the RES Workspace Manager Console and create a new User Setting (User Registry)
6.) The values are stored in the following registrykey:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\Common\Userinfo
7.) Add this path in the new registry setting and create two new REG_SZ keys
UserInitials with the value %Initials%
Username
with the value %Username%
8.) Configure the Access Control and the Workspace Container
9.) Login again into a new session and start Microsoft Office, for example Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, etc…
10.) Open the options and take a look at the user initials.

This is a realy powerfull solution to control your users initials. You can choose to apply the User Registry settings once, so the users are able to edit the initials. You can use a User Preference to store this information in a .UPR (User Preference) with RES Workspace Manager.

2014-08-12_15h40_07    2014-08-12_15h40_16    2014-08-12_15h40_47

2014-08-12_15h41_41    2014-08-12_15h43_17    2014-08-12_15h45_09

2014-08-12_15h45_25

Why is my RES Workspace Manager database growing that fast….??

Last week I was troubleshooting a RES Workspace Manager 2012 environment by one of our customers. A couple of times in one week, the datadisk of the SQL server was full, so at that time the SQL environment was not running anymore. The database of RES Workspace Manager was growing that fast….but why??

When looking for the actually size of the database, I saw that the size is just above the 20 GB. That’s pretty big if you ask me! The biggest data is the “logging” section. Okay…but which logging?? Sinds a few years, there’s a great tool available called DBLogCleanup. This tool has been written by Patrick van Grinsven and is extremely usefull for troubleshooting this kind of stuff.

http://resguru.com/2014/02/new-utility-db-cleanup-tool/

Just run the tool, make a connection to your SQL environment and select the RES Workspace Manager database. At the log section, select “User Settings Sampling mode data“. As you can see, there were over the 16 million items in the database! The process iexplore.exe with the AppGUID 02222….6862 is growing realy fast!! So there’s a lot of User Sampling data in the database. After deleting the sampling data, the size of the database was 10 GB smaller.

1.) Run the DBLogCleanup Tool
2.) Fill in the SQL server, database, user and password
3.) Select the section you want to view
4.) Browse through the processes and note the AppGUID
5.) Open your RES Workspace Manager Console
6.) Navigate to your applications and find the specific AppGUID
7.) Open the properties of the application
8.) Navigate to User Settings and open the Sampling tab
9.) In the right corner hit “clear all sampled data”
10.) Make sure you turn off the sampling mode for that application

Conclusion: make sure you do not use sampling mode for a very long time! All the sampled data is stored in your database, so the database is growing very fast!!

RESDB_01    RESDB_02    RESDB_03

RESDB_04    RESDB_05    RESDB_06