FEP 2010 install Troubleshooting steps

If during the process of moving your environment to FEP 2010, and you should happen to see FEP install failures with an error message of (FEP failed using Package ISV data to calculate precedence from CCM_ISV_SoftwarePolicy. It is required for applying policy. Error: Timeout after waiting 600000ms.) There are a couple of possible fixes from Microsoft suggestions –

1. Wait for CCM client to complete / report to SCCM before pushing software to the system.

2. Attempt to rerun the deployment once you have confirmed the above item.

o Test / review to see if FEP client installed correctly, if not continue

3. Start Powershell on the client by opening Command Prompt and typing Powershell

Run the following Powershell WMI query to check if the CCM_ISV_SoftwarePolicy class exists in WMI:

get-wmiobject -namespace “root/ccm/policy/machine” -class CCM_ISV_SoftwarePolicy

This resulted in the following error:

Get-WmiObject : Invalid class

At line:1 char:14

+ get-wmiobject <<<< -namespace “root/ccm/policy/machine” -class CCM_ISV_SoftwarePolicy

CategoryInfo : InvalidOperation: (:) [Get-WmiObject], ManagementException

+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : GetWMIManagementException,Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.GetWmiObjectCommand

Attempts to manually compile the CCM_ISV.MOF file located in the ConfigMgr Client’s cache folder C:\Windows\System32\CCM\Cache\<Package ID> using the following command produced the error below because the mofcomp.exe could not be found:

mofcomp CCM_ISV.MOF

‘mofcomp’ is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.

Run the SET PATH command from the command prompt to determine if the folder, C:\Windows\System32\Wbem, exists and if not add it to the PATH.After adding this path, the application of the FEP policies was successful.

4. Attempt to rerun the deployment once you have confirmed the above item.

o Test / review to see if FEP client installed correctly, if not continue

5. Uninstall the ConfigMgr client

Register MSXML Dlls: To re-register MSXML, click Start, click Run, type the following command, and then click OK:

Regsvr32 “C:\WINDOWS\system32\msxml3.dll”

Note This command assumes that you want to reregister MSXML 3.0 and that the .dll file is located in the C:\WINDOWS\system32\ folder.

Requested the customer to push the Client Agent again to these systems to re-install it and then to rerun the FEP2010 advertisement.

Re-register the client’s Scripting Libraries: Use the Fix-It from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/949140 (which you did in the past) or perform the registration manualy:

To manually register the scripting components on your computer, use one of the following sets of steps, as appropriate for your situation.

You are running a 32-bit version of the Windows operating system

1. Click Start, click Run, type cmd, and then click OK.

2. Type regsvr32 %systemroot%\system32\vbscript.dll, and then press ENTER.

3. Type regsvr32 %systemroot%\system32\jscript.dll, and then press ENTER.

4. Type regsvr32 %systemroot%\system32\dispex.dll, and then press ENTER.

5. Type regsvr32 %systemroot%\system32\scrobj.dll, and then press ENTER.

6. Type regsvr32 %systemroot%\system32\scrrun.dll, and then press ENTER.

7. Type regsvr32 %systemroot%\system32\wshext.dll, and then press ENTER.

8. Type regsvr32 %systemroot%\system32\wshom.ocx, and then press ENTER.

You are running a 64-bit version of the Windows operating system, and you receive the error message that is mentioned in the “Symptoms” section while you are using the 64-bit scripting components

1. Click Start, click Run, type cmd, and then click OK.

2. Type %systemroot%\system32\regsvr32 %systemroot%\system32\vbscript.dll, and then press ENTER.

3. Type %systemroot%\system32\regsvr32 %systemroot%\system32\jscript.dll, and then press ENTER.

4. Type %systemroot%\system32\regsvr32 %systemroot%\system32\dispex.dll, and then press ENTER.

5. Type %systemroot%\system32\regsvr32 %systemroot%\system32\scrobj.dll, and then press ENTER.

6. Type %systemroot%\system32\regsvr32 %systemroot%\system32\scrrun.dll, and then press ENTER.

7. Type %systemroot%\system32\regsvr32 %systemroot%\system32\wshext.dll, and then press ENTER.

8. Type %systemroot%\system32\regsvr32 %systemroot%\system32\wshom.ocx, and then press ENTER.

6. Re-install the CCMgr Client software

7. Push the Client Agent again to these clients

8. Re-run the FEP2010 advertisement.

o Test / review to see if FEP client installed correctly, if not continue

Sam Westfall, PEI

The Art and Science of Asking Questions is the Source of All Knowledge.

~Thomas Berger

With every blog I write, the process begins in a very similar way. I try to think of recent topics in the IT tech world, search for information on said topics online, then ask myself questions like “Will this be interesting” or “Do I know enough to write about this topic?” And those questions help me to shape a subject and a blog. Asking and answering questions before any task, whether it’s writing a blog or building a home, is extremely important. For instance, if you walk in to the GAP, and ask an associate to help you pick out a pair of pants, there are some questions that you might want to ask yourself before you just start pulling jeans off of the rack. What size are you? What fit are you looking for? Where are you planning to wear these pants? And you will continue to ask questions of yourself until you have narrowed down the selection to the perfect pair of pants. Now, if you had no idea what type of pants you wanted walking in to the GAP, that process might take a while. But if you know you are looking for a pair of boot cut jeans, the process becomes easier.

The same type of scenario goes in to planning your IT projects. If you walk in to a meeting with one of our Account Managers knowing you want to buy servers, but don’t know what you will use them for or specifically why you need new ones, that particular project will probably stop dead in the water until you have put together your own list of needs/wants for those servers. And while it will be the responsibility of the Account Managers and Engineers to become a trusted advisor, suggesting the right servers for your needs, it is good to ask a few specific questions of yourself before taking the next steps. Here are a few examples of great pre-project questions:

1. What are the high-level objectives of the project?

2. What are the estimated costs of the project — and the anticipated rewards?

3. Does the potential project align with the mission, vision, and values of the organization?

4. What are the risks associated with pursuing the project under consideration?

These questions help to answer the business value of your pursued project. And while this list is certainly not all encompassing, it’s a good start and will help keep the tasks at hand on track.

For more detail on those questions, see: http://www.itworld.com/it-managementstrategy/106373/project-management-4-questions-to-ask-before-starting-any-project

Erika Larson, PEI

Direct Access

What is direct access?

DirectAccess is a feature in the Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 operating systems that gives users the experience of being seamlessly connected to their corporate network any time they have Internet access.

With DirectAccess, users are able to access corporate resources (such as e-mail servers, shared folders, or intranet web sites) following common security standards, anytime they have an internet connection.

Key Benefits:

• Improved Productivity

o Helps improve the productivity of remote staff by providing the same, always-on connectivity experience no matter if users are inside or outside the corporate network.

• Secure Connectivity

o Leverages IPsec for authentication and encryption.

o Provides the ability to apply granular policy control over access to resources, applications, and servers.

o Integrates with Microsoft Server and Domain Isolation, Network Access Protection (NAP), and BitLocker solutions, resulting in security, access, and health requirement policies that seamlessly interoperate between intranets and remote computers

• Greater Manageability

o Helps ensure that machines both on the network and off are always healthy, managed, and up-to-date.

o Provides administrators with the ability to update Group Policy settings and distribute software updates any time a remote computer has Internet connectivity, even if the user is not logged on.

o Helps ensure that organizations can meet regulatory and privacy mandates for security and data protection for assets that must roam beyond the corporate network.

I use direct access almost daily and love the ease of use. The look and feel of all the tools and information that I access is the same as if I am in the office. Direct Access is a great tool for working remotely. It just works!

Jon Eyberg, PEI

How to Backup Lync (Part 1)

A question that I am frequently asked after we get Lync installed and running is “How do we backup Lync?” This is a great question and one that is easy to answer. Thanks to the Central Management idea and Topology Builder, we only have to backup a few items in order to get the entire Lync environment backed up.

There are two crucial pieces for most environments. First is the topology itself and then secondly, we need the user’s data (Contacts, etc). To do the first piece, we use Export-CsConfiguration from the Lync Management Shell. An example:

Export-CsConfiguration -FileName MyTopologyBackup.zip

To backup the users data, we need to use the dbimpexp.exe tool. This tool is available in the root folder of the Lync Server installation media. It is also installed at \Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Lync Server 2010\Support as part of the Core Components. Here is an example of how to run the dbimpexp.exe command:

Dbimpexp.exe /hrxmlfile:<path and backup file name> /sqlserver:<SQL Server FQDN>\<instance name>

dbimpexp.exe /hrxmlfile:MyUserDataBackup.xml /sqlserver:mysqlserver.domain.com

With these two pieces you can get most of your Lync environment. In the next article I will detail how to backup other Lync components such as the Location Database, Group Chat and Response Group settings.

Adam Ball, PEI

How Unified Communication Can Improve Your Business

Unified Communications is designed for one thing – to take it easier and more cost effective for employees to connect, and to improve their ability to connect with customers and business partners. The general premise is to merge two or more communications into one easy-to-use interface. Generally, we’re talking about phone calls, instant messaging, conferences and collaboration.

The purpose of this blog is to identify the key drives and pains that small and medium businesses face, and to briefly show how improvements can positively impact the bottom line.

Top Business Challenges

Small and medium businesses are often faced with competition with from larger enterprises. To effectively compete, you need the right tools. Some of the major challenges faced include:

Pressure on Key Employees

Smaller organizations often have a few key “go-to” employees who are in great demand. Because of their critical role, their time is at a premium. What they need are tools that can prioritize their communications.

Owners Who Need to be Everywhere

The need to be constantly available means you’ve got to take calls from anywhere. Technology that stays with you, allows you to identify important contacts, routes communications and enables collaboration is critical.

Multi-Functional Roles

Any employee at a small or medium business leads a busy professional life that requires multiple roles. Juggling customers, partners, colleagues and tasks means you need efficient and time sensitive tools.

Limited IT and Telco Expertise

Small and Medium businesses don’t generally have the same resources and staff to support advanced telecommunication technologies. Have tools that are easy to understand, justify, deploy and manage is essential.

Unified Communications – Improving Business

The integration of voice and other communications makes it easier for your employees to identify and locate people quickly, and access and share critical information. Decision making is faster and better, and customer service is enhanced. By converging resources, the cost of communications, including voice, instant messaging and conferencing, is cut.

The Three Benefits of UC

There are three areas decision makers should pay special attention to:

Customer Services – Skills-based routing, conferencing, and presence within UC make it easier to stay in touch with customers and support their needs.

Improved Productivity – UC uses presence information and “click to communicate” capabilities to speed information to the right people. Collaboration is improved and the numbers of interactions to complete a task are reduced. This means orders are filled faster, decisions are made more quickly, and productivity is increased.

Lower Cost of Communications

A UC Solution may appear expensive, but properly designed and deployed, your communications costs can be reduced. Voice calls and volume is reduced thanks to Instant Message Chats; Travel Time is reduced thanks to audio, video and web conferencing; and Conferencing is delivered more cheaply because you can avoid expensive conference hosting services.

When Do You Consider Unified Communications?

If you’re moving to a new location.

If your old phone system will no longer be supported by the vendor.

If your business is growing and you want to “reach next level.”

If you’ve lost too many sales because opportunities are not getting to the right people quickly enough.

If you hear too many (or any) negative customer service stories.

If your employees work from the road or out of the office—and you can’t reach them when you need them.

Conclusion

Look for partners that can customize a solution that fits your specific business needs and budget. The “one size fits all” or single appliance compromise isn’t going to address what you want, or where you want to go. A competent partner will work with you and address not just the technologies, but the “use case scenarios” that are critical for successful adoption.

Tim Krueger, PEI

Online File Sharing

It started with SOPA, an American legislation to fight off online piracy and illegal file sharing. The proposition was opposed across the online space as people felt it would threaten the right to freedom of expression, and was soon taken down. But the hunt for digital pirates is far from over.

Recently, Megaupload.com was shut down under charges of blatant online piracy, and its owners were arrested and prosecuted. The crackdown continued on to peer to peer sharing networks such as thepiratebay.org, who have shifted their servers and the owners are fleeing arrest. Since then, many websites providing free file hosting have been forced to either shut down or disable file sharing, in a move that is having interesting repercussions.

While everyone can agree that online piracy of intellectual property is a crime and must be suppressed, the methods recently adopted leave some room for debate. Consider the case of many legitimate users who were using these websites to back up their personal data, but now have been forbidden access to it. And if the websites themselves are finally being held accountable for the content uploaded by users, what about sharing networks like YouTube or even Facebook?

The going has already become hard for these websites, as they are being forced to take sides and chalk out a concrete policy. Some of them have disabled file sharing to avoid any trouble. But the real threat this brings is to the emerging cloud computing services model, which relies on data hosting and sharing. Let’s hope the industry can make its way through the chaos right now.

Myke Schwartz, PEI

 

What Makes a Good Client?

It’s often surprising to people when I speak to them about what makes a good client. It’s always presumed that the partner, the vendor or integrators are the ones that have to ‘work’ during a project or long term engagement. Believe me it is not! The very definition of partnership is; an arrangement where parties agree to cooperate to advance their mutual interests. The key word here is ADVANCE meaning move forward …accomplish something. I have worked recently with several new prospects that have found it acceptable to keep some key bits of information from our team. For some reason (I have no idea) they feel that keeping little nuggets of information from a partner or vendor is imperative to maintain control or possibly test their ability to read minds. An ESP evaluation if you will. I’m still unclear when or how the talent of mind reading became associated with IT consulting or selling in general but I’d like to stop that campaign from running again.

Firmly establishing there are limited to no real mind readers on both sides of a client-consultant partnership what then can we do to work better together? First, know your environment. It’s amazing to me how many pre-sales calls I can make with clients on a critical migration project (email, phone, servers) and they have NO idea what’s happening in their own house. Things such as users count or seat counts, server totals and applications are not trivial things, they are THE thing. Without some critical information there is absolutely no way to price a new solution nor is there a way to price the support or engineering hours to get you to that new solution. It’s amazing when clients are upset that you are unable to give them a cost on an email migration when they have no idea what their user count is currently.

Second, know what you want. Ok, this one can be tricky but know at least an idea of what you want. Do you want to move to virtualization or do you want to stay with static servers? If you don’t know what virtualization is just ask. Do you want to empower your users with IM, presence, online meetings and VoIP? Are you looking for a mobile solution or application to help improve productivity? I recently had a client tell me they wanted to migrate to a cloud system for email, calendars and document sharing. After reviewing the pro, cons and costs, uncovering their user count, their total document needs and creating a migration strategy over a several week engagement they seemed frustrated on how long it took to create a plan. Their comment to us was ‘you didn’t tell us what to do you asked us what we wanted’. Shocker, asking what someone wants. Be prepared folks we are going to ask you what you want and it’s ok to say you don’t know.

Last, don’t be afraid to say I don’t know. As stated previously we are going to ask you what you want, when you want it and how you think you might get there. It would never occur to a good partner or consultant to assume you will follow our every direction or command. Remember this is a partnership and we’re going to agree to cooperate to advance our mutual interests. We’ll achieve your interest in complete success while looking good to management and our interest in making you completely happy…or at least satisfied. When we ask the question ‘what do you want’ or ‘what you do envision’ don’t be afraid to say I don’t know. It’s ok because there will be times when you ask us questions and our response will be I don’t know. That’s when we do our jobs of finding the answers for you and helping you better understand what’s possible.

So overall there are really simple principles to being a good client. Know your environment, know what you want and don’t be afraid to say I don’t know. If we work together and share all the details necessary and even the ones that seem unnecessary we’ll achieve that amazing thing together …success!

Jennifer Smith, PEI

Recommendations for Rookies – Microsoft Project Professional 2010

These past couple of months I have been working with my fellow project manager, Dan, to configure and figure out Project Server. After playing with a lot of the settings, I found that the backbone of Project Server’s web application is really Microsoft Project Professional. So far, to us, Server is an interactive platform to do resource allocation and update projects via timesheets. In order for Project Server to behave the way we want, we need project plans that are properly constructed. You can create a basic project plan in the project web app but it is not going to have a lot of the features that our in-depth project plans need.

Through my tests and trials I noticed there is a specific order each column should be filled in that works best. I start with the task name and fill in every task and sub task in the project. Then I build my team and assign the resources required to complete each task. Next I set the order the tasks are to be completed in by noting the predecessors. The last thing I do is determine task type and enter my variables.

Project uses three variables to determine the timeline of a project-Duration, Units and Work. Duration is the overall amount of time it will take to accomplish a task, which is usually measured in days. Units depend on the resource and is the percentage of available time the resource gives to the task. The third, Work, is the amount of time in hours it actually takes to do the task. The underlying concept is that you tell project 2 of the variables, one of which is fixed as the task type, and the program populates the third. For example, if you enter a task with Work = 8 hours and Duration = 2 Days, project will calculate that 50% of the resource’s effort will go to that task on each day. People often overlook that the default task type in Project is Fixed Units. So given the scenario above, if you keep the task type set to Fixed Units and then you change duration, project will recalculate the amount of work. This can be a bit confusing so here is my recommendation for rookies:

The task type should be set to the variable that does not change. Enter that variable for each task in its associated column. Then enter the variable you would like to control in its column. Finally, hit “Calculate Project” and let the program determine the values for the third variable.

Heidi Christensen, PEI

The Advent of the Cloud

With Cloud computing being ‘all the rage’, I can’t help but equate the evolution of the IT sector with the demographic that tends to follow suite. Does anyone really remember “Time Sharing”? One job in…one job out.

If you’re under 45 years old, probably not.

Dumb terminals, probably IBM green screens, hard wired into monolithic mainframes; could be IBM’s, NCR’s, Burroughs, Digital Equipment Corp’s (DEC’s), Wang, Sperry Rand, Control Data (my former employer), Honeywell and yes………even General Electric.

This was the era of the baby boomer. Typically folks born between 1946 and 1964. Green stamps, posty notes, wide ties, milkmen, xx cents for a gallon of gas, hula hoops and Frisbees, drive-ins, silly putty, mood rings, lava lamps, 8 track players and pet rocks all come to mind.

Then Nerds starting showing up……..and creating companies that would forever change the way we live.

PC’s, Client Server, then Enterprise and Internet computing came into vogue and as a result time, sharing and ‘batch processing’ went through any number of transformations.

Application Service Provider (ASP) comes to mind where a vendor might house any number of ‘instances’ of an app and effectively ‘rent’ it to a customer. This is about the time the Gen X crowd (born early 60’s to late 70’s) would have hit the employment market.

Then SaaS (software-as-a-service), PaaS, and IaaS, started showing up. And low and behold……here comes Gen Y (born from the 70’s to 2000) to bring it to the marketplace.

And now “the cloud”…………..

Just wondering what they’ll call that generation. Gen Z?

Matt Teahan, PEI

Lync External Pool Name and Lync Mobility

Here is another tidbit that I came across recently while working with a client. When we setup Lync for them originally, they wanted their internal and external pool names to be exactly the same. At the time, there was no reason it couldn’t be from a technical reason so that is what they chose to do.

With the release of Lync Mobility, we now have a technical reason that the internal and external pool names cannot be the same. The Lync Mobile client is dependent on the web services to sign in and due to how Lync Mobility works, if your pool names are the same, it won’t properly utilize the external web services.

The reason we want to utilize the external web services is so that if you switch from an internal wireless to say a 3G connection, the Lync Mobile client will be able to stay connected. The Lync Mobile service is built with the idea that internal clients will actually use “hair-pinning” in order to sign in. That is, they will go out the firewall and come back in the same interface so that they are accessing Lync Mobility as if they were outside the corporate network.

If you are wanting to implement Lync Mobility, the lesson learned is make sure your internal and external pool names are different.

Adam Ball, PEI