"New software is available"...

Are you seeing this in the system tray every time you log in to your computer? It's pretty annoying. There's even a Microsoft User Voice entry for it.

There is a workaround - set all your application deployment User Experience settings to "Display in Software Center, and only show notifications for computer restarts".

If you have a lot of applications already deployed, going through them one by one would be quite a chore. But, you can easily change all their settings via PowerShell.

In the code below, it changes the settings for every application we have deployed to the "User Optional - Software Center" collection.

#Import ConfigMgr PS module
Import-Module "$env:SMS_ADMIN_UI_PATH\..\configurationmanager.psd1"

#Connect to ConfigMgr drive
$SiteCode = Get-PSDrive -PSProvider CMSITE
Push-Location "$($SiteCode.Name):\"

#Change User Experience
Get-CMApplicationDeployment | Where-Object { 
    $_.CollectionName -eq 'User Optional - Software Center' 
} | Set-CMApplicationDeployment -UserNotification DisplaySoftwareCenterOnly

H/T Reddit

Failed to install distribution point. Error 0x800706BA.

I was trying to install an additional distribution point and was getting the errors below in distmgr.log:

CWmi::Connect() failed to connect to \\server.domain.com\root\CIMv2. Error = 0x800706BA
DPConnection::ConnectWMI() - Failed to connect to  server.domain.com.
Failed to install DP files on the remote DP. Error code = 1722

Lots of Googling suggested the following suggestions:

• Verify prerequisites installed (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sccm/core/plan-design/configs/site-and-site-system-prerequisites).
• Verify site server in administrators group.
• Copy smsdpprov.mof to DP & run mofcomp.exe smsdpprov.mof on DP.
• Disable firewall.

I had done all this. Still seeing the same error. Then we checked NSLOOKUP. There was no record in DNS for our server name.

As it turns out, the IP address for our server was previously assigned to another server in DNS. Our network department swapped it to our new server, and I was able to install the DP role.

I hope this helps someone, as I could not find this info anywhere!

Uninstall Office 365 via script

I had trouble finding this, so I'm documenting here. Need to uninstall Office 365? Here you go.

Create an uninstall.xml file:

<Configuration>
<Display Level="None" AcceptEULA="True" />
<Property Name="FORCEAPPSHUTDOWN" Value="True" />
<Remove>
    <Product ID="O365ProPlusRetail">
      <Language ID="en-us" />
    </Product>
</Remove>
</Configuration>

Create a batch file with the following:

set loc=%~dp0
"%loc%setup.exe" /configure "%loc%uninstall.xml"

Error: 80004005 during imaging

I saw this error in smsts.log when installing applications during OSD. AppEnforce.log had no errors.

I then found this error in CITaskMgr.log:

A little more sleuthing in the CAS.log showed the problem:

The cache was not big enough to download all of the required content. You can change your ConfigMgr client install parameters to increase the cache size (SMSCACHESIZE=XXXXX) to resolve this. In my case, I didn't want all clients to have the larger cache size, so I only applied this to one group of systems. In the section where I'm installing these apps, I add a PowerShell script to increase the cache size:

$Cache = Get-WmiObject -Namespace 'ROOT\CCM\SoftMgmtAgent' -Class CacheConfig
$Cache.Size = '20480'
$Cache.Put()
Restart-Service -Name CcmExec

Adobe Acrobat Pro DC installation failure - exit code 1603

I was getting this error when imaging a new machine. Other apps were installing fine. The error itself didn't offer much information.

I modified the command line to include verbose logging:

MSIEXEC /i "%loc%AcroPro.msi" /q /norestart TRANSFORMS="%loc%AcroPro.mst" /L*V "%loc%Acrobat.log"

I ran the install again and looked at the log file. There I found an error regarding Visual C++ Redistributable 2013. The install failed because this was not present.

Adobe kind of buries the workaround in their documentation, but addding "IGNOREVCRT64=1" to the command line ignores the Visual C++ Redistributable 2013 requirement and installs cleanly.

MSIEXEC /i "%loc%AcroPro.msi" /q /norestart IGNOREVCRT64=1 TRANSFORMS="%loc%AcroPro.mst" /L*V "%loc%Acrobat.log"