Edit (02/15/16): I learned recently that a better approach is to just copy the Administrative Templates from group policy on a workstation and copy it into your AD administrative templates. Not as ridiculous, but still annoying.
This is probably one of the most ridiculous things I’ve encountered.
If you’re a system administrator, you sure as hell don’t want to deal with the Microsoft Store for your image deployments. It’s a superfluous piece of software that’s imposed on us, and Microsoft doesn’t give any tools during the deployment to get rid of it.
They make it even more difficult in a very asinine way to get the GPO you need to manage the Store.
In order to get the Store GPO, you have to install the ‘Desktop Experience’ feature.
Why Microsoft decided to do this is beyond me. Why would do I have to install a piece of bloat on my servers in order to get the GPO to manage the Microsoft Store?
Then you can go to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Store.
I encountered the most bizarre issue: after removing my Powershell Virtual Directory, I could not for the life of me recreate the VD. I continually received the following error:
New-PSSession : [subdomain.mail.domain.com] Connecting to remote server mail.domain.com failed with the following error message : The WinRM client sent a request to an HTTP server and got a response saying the requested HTTP URL was not available. This is usually returned by a HTTP server that does not support the WS-Management protocol. For more information, see the about_Remote_Troubleshooting Help topic.
Nothing online was helping, until I read something randomly about adding the Exchange Snap-In in a regular Powershell window. So I typed the following in Powershell:
In the Lync 2010 world, everything was golden. Lync was pretty cool, and it integrated well with Exchange 2010. Then our senior admin upgraded the network to Lync 2013, and things changed.
Not a whole lot changed, but one thing changed that I kind of enjoyed doing: changing my avatar.
My glorious avatar!
The problem is that in Lync 2013, in order for users to change their pictures, the Exchange environment needs to be 2013, otherwise, users will end up with something like this:
Notice the ‘Edit or Remove Picture’ is greyed out.
After doing a bit of reading, it turns out you can still have pictures, but the administrator needs to upload the pictures and/or somehow pictures need to uploaded into Active Directory.
So what I did — others more well versed may come up with a different solution — is I created my image, saved it into a network share on the Exchange server, and then ran this command in an elevated prompt in the Exchange shell:
Of course, with the appropriate changes to our environment.
Then I hopped over to the Lync server and in an elevated Lync shell, I ran
Update-CsUserDatabase
and
Update-CsAddressBook
I don’t remember where I read those commands, but I did it because I read that Lync updates those items once every 24 hours, so I figured why not force it like doing a group policy refresh.
I did notice that the changes were being made to Exchange because Outlook changed my picture, but what gives with Lync? No answer was being found online, and I even removed the local Lync cache and still no luck.
Then I decided to try hiding my picture, clicking ok, then showing again (like in the image above). It appeared!
The only thing I can think is that was causing it not to work was that the cache wasn’t refreshing on the Lync server, so hiding and showing the image again somehow refreshes it.
Maybe. In any case, at least I can contribute this solution to the web.
Encountered two issues today that need to be noted real quick:
WSUS was giving me a ton of problems with not updating on client machines. Error after error, and I was completely puzzled because I had everything configured correctly. Turns out Microsoft change their port in WSUS from 80 to 8530, so in your internal addressing, you have to add that like this to make it work:
http://wsusserver:8530
System Center 2012 R2 DPM was giving me problems with Replica Inconsistencies. So to fix this, I updated it, and found out that Windows Server Backup feature needs to be installed along with Visual C++, and possibly WinRE disabled. Links below.
