Tag: MDOP

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New MDOP family Member: UE-V


MDOP, the add-on available to organizations with Windows 7 Pro w/SA that gives a number of great desktop management tools, has a new member coming to join it’s ranks:

User Experience Virtualization (UE-V)

What does it do?

“By implementing UE-V, IT departments can enable a consistent experience for users who have multiple devices provided by their company or choose to bring their personal PC or tablet to work. Now users can change their device and keep their experience without reconfiguring applications each time they login to Windows 7 or Windows 8. “

So you can deploy an app to multiple devices at the same time, keeping the same configurations across the board…improving the user experience and reducing the load on IT – both of which are key as IT continues to become more of a leading part within organizations

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Microsoft MDOP


MDOP AKA the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack is one of the least well known Microsoft products, and that’s a shame as it’s packed full of goodness!

It’s only available to customers who have Software Assurance on Windows Desktop OS licences (Vista, Windows 7 etc) and contains the following:

Application Virtualization (App-V)

Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V)

Diagnostics & Recovery Toolset (DaRT)

Advanced Group Policy Management (AGPM)

Asset Inventory Services (AIS)

System Center Desktop Error Monitoring (SCDEM)

These tools can help make managing systems so much easier in so many ways!

They are licensed on a per user per month basis which means they’re not available on all licensing programmes-namely MDOP is missing from Open licensing. If MDOP is attractive to you, you should look at the Open Value Program to get MDOP and other benefits too.

There’s a whole host of MDOP videos from Tech-Ed available here. Be warned though-they require a TechEd Online subscription.

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Diagnostic and Recovery Tool (DaRT)


DaRT is what was previously known as WINternals and is a great piece of software, a real boon to any IT admin’s toolkit. It comes with all kinds of tools and tricks to troubleshoot unresponsive PCs and get them back up and running by removing malware, fixing drivers and more.

The first part is the Crash Analysis Wizard, which looks at .dmp files (crash dumps) and pulls out the relevant info to tell you why the crash has happened.

The next part is ERD Commander. This lets you create a start up image that you will use in the future on seemingly unbootable machines. Once you have given it an OS (which it can extract from your install disk), you choose which tools you want to include on the disk…the choice is:

  • Computer Management
  • Crash Analyzer
  • Disk Commander
  • Disk Wipe
  • Explorer
  • File Restore
  • Hotfix Uninstall
  • Locksmith
  • Registry Editor
  • Solution Wizard
  • Standalone System Sweeper
  • System File Repair
  • TCP/IP Configuration

    • You can then add any specific .inf files (drivers) that you would need, if you have specific extra hardware requirements in your organization.

    Brandon LeBlanc from the Windows Blog has got a great post on DaRT here.

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    System Center Desktop Error Monitoring (SCDEM)


    SCDEM is the newest addition to the MDOP family and it’s a corker!

    What does it do?

    SCDEM captures all application & OS failures across your enterprise and stores them in one central location, to enable your technicians to track, monitor and pro-actively respond to issues.

    This is like a local version of the “Send error report to Microsoft” box you sometimes get when apps crash and hang. While it’s good for MS to have this information, in a larger enterprise it’s more immediately useful for the in-house IT team to have it. This way they can identify error trends and match them up to recent changes they’ve made to the network, desktops, 3rd party software etc-thus quickly identifying, and (hopefully) fixing, the problem.

    It also enables you to create a company specific knowledge base of fixes for errors.

    Advantages of SCDEM

    Increase productivity of users: Once SCDEM has been running for a while, IT will have had a chance to identify and correct the vast majority of common issues. That means that there will be less errors on the desktops and thus less downtime for users. The internal knowledge base will also make it easier for end users to be pro-active and solve their own issues without having to log a ticket with the help desk.

    Easy Deployment: Due to it using the standard Windows error reporting system, all it takes to get SCDEM deployed to however many 1000’s of PC’s you have with a single Group Policy in Active Directory-nice huh? 🙂

    Advanced Reporting: SCDEM provides many different reports to show which applications crash most, when they crash etc so that IT can make well informed decisions when it comes to patching and fixing.

    For anyone who is using SCDEM and having problems, I’ve just found a great whitepaper on Troubleshooting this program. Download here. The Technet blog post is here.

    If you head over to this Technet blog, you can see a great video of SCDEM in action-here.

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