Practical IT Guides for Windows, SCCM & PowerShell Admins

TechyGeeksHome has been helping IT professionals and sysadmins since 2010. Find 1,500+ real-world guides covering Windows 10 & 11, Windows Server, SCCM/ConfigMgr, PowerShell scripting, Active Directory, networking, and virtualisation — all written from hands-on production experience by a UK IT pro with 26 years in the field.

Controlling Autodiscovery for Outlook using Group Policy

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We have recently been working on a Microsoft Office 365 email migration from on-premise to cloud based Exchange. One of the challenges that we faced was making the migration process as painless as possible for the end user. However, with thousands of end users having Microsoft Outlook 2010 installed and already configured to work with … Read more

Start a stopped service on multiple devices using Powershell

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Following on from our recent guide about restarting a service on multiple devices, we were also asked about starting a stopped service using a similar method. This is pretty simple and can be carried out in almost exactly the same way. Powershell Script So to carry this out, you should create a txt file with … Read more

How to create correct partitions to deploy a Windows image to a UEFI based device

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We have recently come across an issue when trying to deploy a test virtual machine using Hyper-V (Generation 2 – UEFI) that once you have selected your task sequence, you get an error and the task sequence bombs out. This is because we had not setup the correct drive partitions to be able to deploy … Read more

Restart a service on multiple devices using Powershell

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We recently had a requirement to restart a single service on multiple devices across a single network. At first, it was going to be the job of the helpdesk to logon to each device and manually restart this service. However, as usual, there is always a way of using Powershell to speed up such tasks. … Read more

SCCM – Create user collections based on Active Directory department attribute with Powershell

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We recently built a new Configuration Manager system for a client who wanted user collections for all departments and companies within their corporate group. We were going to set these up manually which is a fairly simple, but time consuming, job to do. But this was a time restricted installation so we had a quick … Read more

SCCM – Create a device collection based on Exchange Server role

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Following on from our recent posts for Configuration Manager collection queries, we have another one here for all devices that are Microsoft Exchange servers. Go ahead and create a new device collection and then use this query: select * from SMS_R_System inner join SMS_G_System_SERVICE on SMS_G_System_SERVICE.ResourceId = SMS_R_System.ResourceId where SMS_G_System_SERVICE.Name like “Microsoft Exchange%” Save the … Read more

Enable Windows Remote Desktop Protocol and Set Firewall Rules using PowerShell

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If you are using Windows Server 2012 or newer, or if you are just using Windows Server Core, then this Powershell script will help you out by enabling Remote Desktop and setting the correct firewall inbound rules. Simply open up an elevated Powershell command box, or use Powershell ISE and use the two scripts below, … Read more