Tag: evergreen

Download and install latest Office 365 via Office Deployment Tool (ODT)

Inspired by Trond Eric Haavarstein’s evergreen PowerShell setup scripts, I created a download and install script for Office 365 Deployment Tool (ODT).

Microsoft Office 365 is the new standard in the EUC space right now. To honor this, we need a fast and reliable way to install it with our favorite deployment tools like MDT or PDQ,  for example when you rebuild your master images.

There are a few different ways to deploy Office 365, but they are all similar:

  • You need the Office 365 Click-to-run setup.exe (Office Deployment Tool (ODT))
  • You need a XML configuration file
  • You decide to deploy from a pre-build offline cache or the files are downloaded from Microsoft each and every time

And then you go: setup.exe /configure configuration.xml

Pretty straight forward you think, but non the less I had problems with this approach. And this is due to the fact, that the Office Deployment Tool itself gets updated pretty often. And this breaks your unattended deployments sooner or later, as the setup.exe stops working. Continue reading “Download and install latest Office 365 via Office Deployment Tool (ODT)”

Download and install latest Release of PowerShell

I created a PowerShell script to include the latest Version of PowerShell into your MDT Reference Image.

With the General Availability (GA) of PowerShell 7, it is time to think about updating our MDT Reference Images. Furthermore the increasing number of remote backends that require a minimum TLS 1.2 for remote connections with for example Invoke-WebRequest like PowerShell Gallery and several other JSON APIs.

Continue reading “Download and install latest Release of PowerShell”

Integrate PDQ Deploy with Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT)

A PDQ Deploy Enterprise license is an easy way to integrate evergreen applications into your MDT master images. In this blog post I’m going to show you one way to do this.

Download the latest release of PDQ Deploy:
https://link.pdq.com/dl-deploy-release

Start the setup
Start the setup

Continue reading “Integrate PDQ Deploy with Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT)”

Integrate the VcRedist PowerShell Module with Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT)

The VcRedist PowerShell Module by Aaron Parker provides an easy to use evergreen module to integrate the Microsoft Visual C++ Runtimes into your MDT Reference Images.

If you are using the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) to build your Reference Images and Citrix Master Images, you are most certainly trying to include the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributables for Visual Studio into your Reference Images. Recently I switched to the VcRedist PowerShell Module by Aaron Parker to achieve this task and with this blog post I’m going to show you how to do this yourself. Continue reading “Integrate the VcRedist PowerShell Module with Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT)”

Download and install latest Tablacus Explorer

In all of my current EUC deployments, I install Tablacus Explorer as an alternative to explorer.exe for use as a published application. This is an evergreen PowerShell script, that downloads and installs the latest version.

In one of my past articles I presented Tablacus Explorer as an replacement for explorer.exe in Citrix Virtual Apps und Desktops (formerly XenApp) as a published application. With automation more and more being mandatory in IT projects, I needed a way to install Tablacus Explorer evergreen with PowerShell each and every time I deploy it to Windows Clients, RDSH, Citrix virtual apps or desktops or in MDT Task sequences. Once again I used one of Trond Eric Haavarstein example scripts and altered it to fit my needs. Here are the results. Continue reading “Download and install latest Tablacus Explorer”