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.

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 :)

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.

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.

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.

I have been helping Alan Renouf, co-host of the Get-Scripting podcast, with a PowerShell script and he has been nice enough to mention me and my blog on during their latest episode.

If you haven't already checked out the Get-Scripting podcast you can listen and subscribe to it at http://get-scripting.blogspot.com.

The WinPE customisations keep coming, wanting more information about the system you are running WinPE on?

If you are familiar with BGInfo, you already know that it is a great way of displaying information about a system and you probably already use it in your base server build (for those not in the know check out BGInfo on TechNet). But what you may not know is that it works in WinPE and you can draw that same information out and display it on the screen.

Simply add the BGInfo executable and custom layout file to your WinPE scripts directory, modify your unattend.xml to include "X:\BGInfo.exe /accepteula /timer:0 /iqX:\WinPE.bgi /silent" and you are up and running.

To get you started I have added my layout file for download WinPE.zip (.86 KB).

NOTE: BGInfo is a 32-bit executable and since WinPE 2.0 64-bit doesn't support WOW it will only work in a 32-bit WinPE environment.

Something that I have been meaning to write up for some time now...

In nearly every environment I have worked in I have always come across some type of issue with Broadcom NICs.

In my most recent bout, it was determined that the network wasn't always (seemed to swap between having link negotation issues and invalid IP addresses) 100% initialised in WinPE before a task in the unattend.xml started executing. In our particular case we were working with Microsoft Deployment Toolkit which builds a custom WinPE image as part of deployment point synchronising.

Sample boot.bat

@echo off
echo.
echo INFO: Executing Sleep
echo.
cscript //nologo "%systemdrive%\sleep.vbs" 10
echo.
echo INFO: Renewing IP Address
ipconfig /renew
echo.
echo INFO: Executing Sleep
echo.
cscript //nologo "%systemdrive%\sleep.vbs" 10
echo.

Sample sleep.vbs

Unattend.xml Extract

< RunSynchronous >
   < RunSynchronousCommand wcm:action = " add " >
      < Description > CommandBreak WINPE Customisations </ Description >
      < Order > 1 </ Order >
      < Path > X:\boot.bat </ Path >
   </ RunSynchronousCommand >
   < RunSynchronousCommand wcm:action = " add " >
      < Description > Lite Touch PE </ Description >
      < Order > 2 </ Order >
      < Path > wscript.exe X:\Deploy\Scripts\LiteTouch.wsf </ Path >
   </ RunSynchronousCommand >
</ RunSynchronous >

Patching is one of those tasks you want to bundle up with some other critical work that you can kick off on the side while you dig into the pizza you expensed for dinner. It is necessary work but never exciting.

So imagine my surprise when I applied ISA 2006 Service Pack 1 and got new features, it was like XP Service Pack 2 all over again :)

New to the ISA Management console is Change Tracking, and once enable will keep detailed records on what really changed after the new guy has implemented an RFC.

This feature is fantastic! Even if you have processes out the wazoo this information will be invaluable when you really want to know why the website really went down .

Change management isn’t the only new feature to ISA 2006; there is also rule testing and traffic simulators (just to name a few). Check out http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc707230.aspx for the full story.