CommandBreak_

Convert Office XML formats to Office 97-2003 with PowerShell

Ben Parker — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 08:24:23 GMT

In the past I have spent some time with the Office Automation APIs and with the recent release of Office 2010, it seems as good as any time to open up Pandora’s Box and try again.

I have bundled up some basic functions for converting Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents to the previous version; you can find them here at http://www.commandbreak.com/content/binary/convert_Officefiles.zip. Not much has changed and these functions all utilise the Application.Open and Application.SaveAs methods.

Enjoy

PSUGAU - Getting your scripts production ready

Ben Parker — Thu, 06 May 2010 23:14:58 GMT

Attached are all the 'bits' from my presentation to the PowerShell Usergroup, I will follow up with a post on signing your scripts in the next day or so.

Thank you to all those who attended.

PSUGAU.zip (894.05 KB)

PSUGAU - PSProviders in 10 minutes

Ben Parker — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 01:51:10 GMT

Attached is the slide deck from my presentation at this mornings Brisbane PowerShell User Group.

You will find all references and silde comments for my presentation.

PSUGAU - PSProviders in 10 minutes.pptx (764.12 KB)

Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool 2.1

Ben Parker — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 00:36:15 GMT

If you haven't already seen the Microsoft Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool 2.1 (OVMST) you don't know what you are missing!

Built around System Centre Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) and Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) or System Centre Configuration Manager (SCCM) this Solution Accelerator schedules updates to for VMs that are archived or offline.

This updated version provides support of:

SCVMM 2008 R2
Windows Server 2008 R2
Windows 7

For those that are interested you can see a recording of me demoing (the previous version) here.

Windows 7 KMS Installation Keys

Ben Parker — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 01:08:56 GMT

If you are licence for Windows 7 (or 2008 R2) with a volume licensing you will need the following product keys in your unattend.xml to allow the installation to succeed. This is a change from Vista which didn’t require a key on installation to then activate against a KMS server.

Windows 7 Professional - FJ82H-XT6CR-J8D7P-XQJJ2-GPDD4
Windows 7 Professional N - MRPKT-YTG23-K7D7T-X2JMM-QY7MG
Windows 7 Enterprise - 33PXH-7Y6KF-2VJC9-XBBR8-HVTHH
Windows 7 Enterprise N - YDRBP-3D83W-TY26F-D46B2-XCKRJ
Windows 7 Enterprise E - C29WB-22CC8-VJ326-GHFJW-H9DH4
Windows Server 2008 R2 HPC Edition - FKJQ8-TMCVP-FRMR7-4WR42-3JCD7
Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter - 74YFP-3QFB3-KQT8W-PMXWJ-7M648
Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise - 489J6-VHDMP-X63PK-3K798-CPX3Y
Windows Server 2008 R2 for Itanium-Based Systems - GT63C-RJFQ3-4GMB6-BRFB9-CB83V
Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard - YC6KT-GKW9T-YTKYR-T4X34-R7VHC
Windows Web Server 2008 R2 - 6TPJF-RBVHG-WBW2R-86QPH-6RTM4

Convert DOCX to DOC with PowerShell

Ben Parker — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 09:20:46 GMT

It would appear that most of the corporate world is still running Office 2003, which is fine - I am sure you have your reasons! But why the F*(K haven't you deployed the compatibility pack to view Office 2007 documents?

The hassle more than likely comes back to the sender (you!!) with a request to change the format of their documents, and although it isn't really my problem I have to oblige (otherwise, they may not pay my invoice).

==========
RANT OVER
==========

The script below will convert any Office 2007 (DOCX) files in a folder to a Office 97-2003 (DOC) format using the Office automation API.

get-childItem >>> -filter >>> *.docx | foreach >>> {
   $doc = "$($_.fullname)"
   $2000doc = $($doc.substring(0,$($doc.length - 1)))
   $office = New-Object >>> -ComObject >>> word.application

   write-host >>> "Opening - $doc"
   $word = $office.Documents.Open($doc)

   write-host >>> "Saving - $2000doc"
   $word.SaveAs2000($2000doc)

   $word.close()
   $office.quit()
}>

BIG - Managing Virtual Environments using System Centre Virtual Machine Manager

Ben Parker — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 02:03:30 GMT

If you missed the Brisbane Infrastructure Group last night you can checkout the Live Meeting recording (https://www112.livemeeting.com/cc/microsoft/viewRecordings, recording id BDT4KQ) and see the my presentation on "Managing Virtual Environments using System Centre Virtual Machine Manager".

And lastly thank you to everyone who provided words of wisdom and the BIG team for the presentation spot.

Enjoy :)

Critical Hyper-V updates?

Ben Parker — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 05:03:47 GMT

An private update has been released for users experiencing the following issues:

You cannot connect to a virtual machine when the Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V VMMS certificate has expired

Cannot connect to the virtual machine because the authentication certificate is expired or invalid. Would you like to try connecting again?

'VMName' failed to initialize.
Could not initialize machine remoting system. Error: ‘Unspecified error’ (0x80004005).
Could not find a usable certificate. Error: ‘Unspecified error’ (0x80004005).

And then today I noticed this posted on Ben Armstrong's blog:

Management Operating System

This is a new term that we are introducing in Windows Server 2008 R2. We have been struggling without a good term here – as with Virtual PC / Virtual Server we had a nice set of terms where we could talk about the physical computer / virtual machine and the host operating system / guest operating system. However this became muddier with Hyper-V – because we no longer really have a host operating system, and all operating systems run on top of the hypervisor. Most people have been just using the term “Parent” or “Parent partition” to refer to what we used to call the host operating system – but this is not really architecturally correct. Unfortunately the architecturally correct terms are – frankly – hideous; they are the “parent partition guest operating system” and the “child partition guest operating system”. Yuck. So after a lot of thought we decided to call the “parent partition guest operating system” the “Management operating system” as this is the operating system you use to manage your virtual machines, and “guest operating system” will be reserved to mean the operating system running inside virtual machines.

BIG Hello

Ben Parker — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 09:32:00 GMT

If you are interested in learning about managing a virtual environment with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 come along to the Brisbane Infrastructure Group meeting Tuesday (10th of March) to see Mark Rhodes and myself speak.

It is a free event and you can register over at there Events page.

Hope to see you there.

ADS tools for WinPE 2

Ben Parker — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 13:12:51 GMT

If you are performing a migration to a new deployment suite, or if you just like to have every disk imaging tool in a WinPE WIM ready at a moment's notice, you might want to consider adding the Microsoft Automated Deployment Services (ADS) for legacy image support.

First off you will need to get a copy of the tools and the easiest way is to run the setup wizard for ADS and perform a custom installation. Be careful which options you install, multiple PXE agents in an environment could destroy all your hard work, see a screenshot of the installation options I used below.

Once installed you will need to collect the following file and incorporate them into your tools folder for WinPE.

"%windir%\system32\adssupport.dll"
"%programfiles%\Microsoft ADS\bin\*.*"

Done, enjoy.