Replace KMS with AD based Activation?

For those who have a need to activate windows 2012 servers or later and/or clients with windows 8 and above it is well worth having a look at AD based activation.

There are a couple of prerequisites, notably that the AD schema must be extended to the 2012r2 level and the Volume Activation Services role (VAMT) must be installed on a 2012r2 server.

Once you have that you can add your KMS host key using VAMT – this key can be activated online or over the phone.

**When I last did this at a dark site I was able to use a smartphone to complete the activation rather than the rather tedious process of relaying seemingly endless amounts of numbers**

When this is complete qualifying client computers are activated from a Domain Controller during their startup process.

Wins

This removes the need to have KMS servers in your environment along with the minimum count requirements associated (the number of requests before the KMS server will activate clients).

You’ll still need KMS if you need to activate workgroup PCs or windows 7/2008r2 but for those migrating to Windows 10 and especially within a VDI deployment I think this is certainly the way to go!

Importantly you can also activate office 2013 suites and above this way.

For the full process check out the TechNet article here

Windows 10 handy hint- Window Transparency

I came across a useful little feature of windows 10 recently - the ability to make your powershell (or indeed cmd) windows transparent. 

Really handy if you don’t have much screen space and you want to refer to code from another source.

UEM Network Drive Management

Traditionally you might map user network drives via a logon script or maybe a group policy preference.  VMware’s User Environment Manager (UEM) gives you some other nice options in the fun filled world of drive mappings!

We can take a conventional approach by mapping a drive for all users or targeting by an AD object such as group or OU.  OK, so far so group policy preferences!

Why don’t we map a drive on a per application basis?  Using UEM we can associate the mapped drive with an app and set it to apply ‘on demand’ when said application is launched.  This avoids the need for the drive mapping to happen at user logon but it is available when required. 

But what about my power users that want to be able to manually map drives (and persist them across devices)?  UEM does not capture these manually mapped drives by default but we can add the below registry location so this information is stored and reproduced in a different session

I’ve used network drives as an example here but by moving application settings into UEM we can optimise the logon process, provide a consistent user experience and control all relevant app settings in one place.  Very Nice!