Installing Exchange System Manager for Exchange 2003 on Windows 7

This morning my colleague decided that he wanted to upgrade his XP machine to Windows 7. Other than myself, no one else on the support team had Windows 7, so the need to have Exchange 2003 tools integrated into Windows 7 wasn't there until this morning. ( I always remoted into a Windows XP machine or into the server.)

So after looking into how to get Exchange 2003 tools on a Windows 7 machine, I came up with this.

1. Download the "Exchange System Manager for Windows Vista"
   (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=3403d74e-8942-421b-8738-b3664559e46f&displaylang=en)
2. On the Windows 7 machine, go to Control Panel -> Programs and Features -> Turn Windows features on or off -> Expand Internet Information Services -> Expand Web Management Tools and then install all of the IIS 6 Management Compatibility tools.
3. Open Command Prompt on the Windows 7 machine as an Administrator and navigate to where you stored ESMVISTA.msi. 
4. Run "ESMVISTA.msi /q"
5. You should now be able to open up the properties on a user account through the ADUC and see your exchange tabs.

Automatic Activation of Office 2010

If you're using a MAK key for Office 2010, you'll have the problem where after Office is installed on a machine the first user who uses it will be prompted to activate online. To prevent this from happening do the following.

In the custom MSP file, go to the "Add installations and run programs section", then click Add. In the "Target" field put in "[SystemFolder]\cscript.exe" (without the quotes) and then in the Arguments field put in "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14\ospp.vbs" /act (quotes included) Make sure you have "Run this program after the Office product has been installed" checked and you're good to go.

Automatic Activation of Windows 7/Server 2008

The following will automatically active a Windows 7 / Server 2008 OS during the imaging process.

Create a Run Command Line task and run "SLMGR.VBS -ato" from the %systemroot%\system32 directory.

As long as the OS is configured to use a valid product key and has a connection to the Internet or KMS server, it will successfully activate.

Disable UAC in Windows Vista, Windows 7, Server 2008, and Server 2008 R2

Here's a registry key you can import during your task sequence that will disable the UAC in the latest version of Windows and Server.

In your task sequence insert a command line task. For the command line put in "regedit /S uac.reg", then set the start in directory to a drive that you've already mapped that has the UAC registry key in it. Place a reboot task directly after the UAC registry key is imported and after a reboot the UAC will be disalbed.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System]
"EnableLUA"=dword:00000000

Deploying Server 2008 R2 Std via SCCM

I was asked to create a deployment for Server 2008 R2 today. I figured it would be easy as hell, however that wasn't the case. The task sequence kept throwing an error on the "Setup Windows and ConfigMgr task. Ends up it was due to the product key. After messing around with the TS over and over again, I found that if I removed the product key the TS would finish successfully. I ended up finding out that the copy of Server 2008 R2 that I got off my companies licensing site doesn't allow for a MAK key to be entered during setup. After some more searching online however I found a way to input the MAK key another way so that when the OS went to automatically activate itself it wouldn't throw an error.

What you need to do is add a Run Command Line task to your TS that comes after the OS is already installed. Put in the command line "SLMGR.VBS -ipk XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX" and then tell it to start in %system root%\system32.

By doing that you're specifying a product key to be used during automatic activation.

Hide the ConfigMgr task sequence dialog box

Found this today. Figured I would post it up here.

You can hide the task sequence dialog box for a step by having your script run the following code. After that step is completed however and the next step starts, the dialog box will come back.

Set oTSProgressUI = CreateObject("Microsoft.SMS.TSProgressUI")
oTSProgressUI.CloseProgressDialog
Set oTSProgressUI = Nothing 

ConfigMgr Console | The RPC Server is unavailable

In the event that you get the error

The RPC server is unavailable. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x800706BA)

when trying to launch the ConfigMgr console on a remote machine, the following is probably what's going on.

You're probably running Configuration Manager on a Server 2008 host, and you haven't unblocked Remote Administration in the Windows Firewall. Either unblock that, or disable the Windows Firewall. Whichever you decide to do should fix your problem and allow you to manage ConfigMgr remotely.