microsoft – blog

The Case of Being Mostly Cloudy, Continued

A couple posts ago I wrote about my struggles to make some sense of all the cloud storage I have, and what to do with the spaces that are scattered around the Internet. As I’ve been working through this I’ve started to make some final decisions. I’ve upgraded a couple things now that should bring some stability for at least the next year.

My motivation for doing all this, and my hesitation and nervousness as I’ve worked my way through this process, has been my pictures. I am incredibly paranoid about losing the photos I have on my phone of my children, in particular. One of the major reasons I purchased my 128GB iPhone 6, other than to be able to store every single MP3 I have locally on the device, is to make sure I have room for my pictures. All my pictures.

I have pictures of my children on my phone that were taken with an iPhone 3G. I like having those photos there on my phone always accessible. I have them backed up in several different places, both locally on my hard drives at home (both internal and external to my desktop) as well as in several different cloud locations. I do not want to ever lose any of them, and I take those insane steps to ensure that doesn’t happen.

The root of this problem is that I have not been able to fully trust iCloud and how Apple treats pictures. For example, Apple seemingly arbitrarily separates out photos on the Camera Roll from other types of pictures. Why? If I take a picture it should go with all the other pictures on my phone. One spot. Easy. The iPhone has never done this–or at least done it very well.

Apple is trying though–at least I think so. Enabling the iCloud Photo Library is a step to make sure that all pictures go into one place, and can be accessible anywhere. But again, when I went to turn on the Photo Library on my iPhone I was presented with a message that doing so would remove 3,000+ photos and videos from my phone. What? Why? If I turn on the iCloud Photo Library it should automatically take every picture and video on my phone that isn’t stored on iCloud and upload it. There is no reason for this. This is also not the first time changing a setting on my iPhone has hit me with a warning such as this.

That is a perfect example of why I haven’t been able to fully trust Apple and iCloud with the well-being of my pictures and videos. Because of this, I took Microsoft up on their offer of a free year of Office365, which includes 1TB of storage space on OneDrive. It’s ironic the one service I’ve come to trust to securely store photos and videos from my iPhone is a Microsoft app.

Since signing up with Office365/OneDrive for a year, I triple-checked that every photo, video, slo-mo, burst, and panoramic image on my phone was backed up in several different locations including fully imported in to Apple’s Photos program on my MacBook, and then copying all of the files out of Photos and into a separate folder elsewhere on the Mac’s hard drive. Then…reluctantly…hesitantly…with both fingers crossed…I took the plunge, and enabled the iCloud Photo Library warning and all.

As it stands now, a couple days after agreeing to have a few thousand image and video files wiped off my phone…things seem to be OK. Everything that was in Photos now shows up in iCloud and on my iPhone. I’ve also added many more pictures taken with a digital camera dating back to 2006 to the iCloud Photo Library, and those images are now available on every device I have connected to iCloud as well.

So now, after all of that (largely self-inflicted) grief and consternation, I return to my original premise of what to do with all of the cloud storage options I have. Here’s what I’ve come up with:

iCloud: Primary home for all digital photos and videos, and Apple device backups
- I currently have more than half of my 50GB allotment free, so this space should last a while.
OneDrive: Primary photo and video backup
- The one issue with iCloud I want to guard against is a mistaken edit or file deletion cascading across all of my synced devices I before I could stop it. OneDrive will serve that role for now. I’ll be revisiting this decision in a year’s time when Microsoft wants $70 to continue my subscription.
Google Drive: Personal file sharing across all my devices
- Since I use Chrome as my primary browser this will be the easiest place to transfer personal files around to each device.
Box: Work file sharing
- My institution has an enterprise license for Box, so I’ll store work-related files and documents in it. This will let me be more mobile in where I work, and make sure that my personal and work files don’t become intermingled. My personal Box account will now lay fallow.
Dropbox: Abandoned
- I’ll keep my account, and likely even keep the sync client installed on my desktop at home. However, with it’s comparatively tiny space allocation verses the other options I have available it will likely stay unused and empty.

We’ll see how long this lasts.

The Case of Cleaning SCCM

I ran into a problem over the last couple of days that I hadn’t encountered before: a System Center Configuration Manager client that wouldn’t talk to the management server, and wouldn’t uninstall. This was a Windows 10 laptop, which may have contributed to the issue. In the end I had to do some googlesleuthing to discover the answer, which required me to go full-on manual uninstall including removing registry keys to actually get the client out.

First I tried the standard ccmsetup.exe /uninstall which did exactly nothing. I tried both regular and administrator command prompts, but to no avail. My next step was to use the ccmclean.exe utility that was supposed to rip out any SCCM client install. For me and the Win10 laptop however, it didn’t get everything.

My final step was to do the manual uninstall. This requires the following which I found here:

Removing these services (neither of these were present on the Win10 laptop that I could find):
1. SMS Agent Host Service
2. CCMSetup Service
Removing the following directories:
1. %windir%\ccm
2. %windir%\ccmsetup
3. %windir%\ccmcache
Removing the following files:
1. %windir%\smscfg.ini
2. %windir%\sms*.mif
Removing these registry keys:
1. HKLM\Software\Microsoft\ccm
2. HKLM\Software\Microsoft\CCMSETUP
3. HKLM\Software\Microsoft\SMS
Removing these WMI namespaces:
1. Root\CIMV2\SMS
2. Root\CCM

The last step presented a problem as the tools to edit WMI didn’t work on the Win10 computer. I found some PowerShell commands in the comments section of this page that are supposed to do this instead:

get-wmiobject -computername [COMP] -query “SELECT * FROM _Namespace WHERE Name=’CCM'” -Namespace “root” | Remove-WmiObject
get-wmiobject -query “SELECT * FROM _Namespace WHERE Name=’sms'” -Namespace “root\cimv2” | Remove-WmiObject

Despite trying them both verbatim, fiddling with syntax, and rewording both as older-style PowerShell code, I couldn’t get either of those to work. Regardless, once I went through all those steps I was able to reinstall the SCCM client, and it now seems to work correctly.

The Case of Being Mostly Cloudy

For a while it seemed that everyone was always giving away copious amounts of storage on whatever cloud service they were offering. I signed up for a few, but never really used them much. It was storage I had available, but I didn’t do much with it.

My primary issue was that with some of these services I was signed up twice, once tied to my work email and the other to a personal account. This rather defeated the purpose of cloud storage, not having one account easily accessible from different places. the other was that at work I long ago switched my primary computer to be a persistent virtual machine. the data drive on that VM is only about 6GB, which had to provide room for all of my settings and local data. That left no room to sync Dropbox, Box, or OneDrive.

A few years ago I actually began to formalize what cloud storage services I used and how I used them. The impetus was two fold. First, moving to Chrome as my web browser allowed easy access to my Google Drive account. Second, Dropbox and later OneDrive implemented automatic photo uploading from your smart phone. This gave me yet another place to securely backup and store all of the photos on my phone.

As time progressed however, things have shifted which is causing me to reevaluate how I use my cloud storage. Google Drive has become my standard location to save individual important files to the cloud for backup. Any document that I want to make sure will survive a catastrophic hard drive crash ends up there.

Dropbox, meanwhile, is essentially dead to me at this point. My automatic photo uploads quickly overwhelmed the less than 6GB of space I have. It’s been full for quite a while, and with that size limit I’m not sure what I will us it for when I finally clean it out. A backup for Google Drive? That seems a bit excessive…

OneDrive is now moving to the same fate as Dropbox. The 25GB of storage I have currently has been perfect for automatic photo uploading, and allowed me to store all of my photos there for easy review and retrieval. Now however, in July OneDrive will reduce my space down to 5GB unless I subscribe to Office 365. Doing so will get me 1TB (!) of space, but that means paying for another cloud storage service, because…

There is also iCloud. For the past couple of years I paid for the lowest tier of storage, because that was what I needed to backup my iPhones, iPads, and MacBooks (I should point out that everything other than the iPhones are work-owned devices). I have resisted converting my legacy iCloud account into a proper iCloud Drive account, but now my 20GB storage limit is forcing my hand.

On a trip this past weekend I took a ton of photos, including longs runs of burst shots with my iPhone. My iCloud storage was already nearing the limit, and this flurry of activity has run me out of space. So my decision now is whether or not to upgrade and convert to iCloud Drive, which means that I have to change how I think about iCloud and what I use it for.

Up until this point, iCloud for me had one purpose: To backup my i-devices. That was it. It was not for file storage, syncing, or other activities such as those. iCloud was my first line of backup to guard against an iPhone or iPad data loss. Google Drive backed up individual files of my choosing. OneDrive was a second backup for my pictures. It was a three-phase approach, and now two of those phases are shifting.

As it stands right now OneDrive will likely become superfluous storage along with Dropbox. I’m not sure what either will be used for. Google Drive will remain as it is. iCloud may become my primary backup method after and upgrade and conversion to iCloud Drive. I haven’t quite worked all of this out yet.

The Case of the Passive Install: Office 2013 and Acrobat Pro 2015 (DC)

Today I spent configuring and updating our installation points for Office 2013 and Acrobat Professional 2015 a.k.a. Acrobat DC. Office 2013 went fairly smoothly, as it usually does, configuring both a custom passive install and automatically adding Service Pack 1. The process for it is pretty simple:

Run “setup.exe /admin” from a Command Line.
Set the options and changes you wish from the customization tool.
Save your MSP file to the Updates folder.
Download the offline installer for the latest Service Pack.
Run the SP installer with the “/extract” switch and unzip all of the files to the Updates folder.

Acrobat Pro however, was a little more annoying.

Download Adobe’s Customization Wizard.
Once you have that, open the AcroPro.msi from within the wizard.
Make your changes, generate the Transform file, and save that to the Transforms folder in the Acrobat installation directory.
Save the AcroPro.msi file.

The problem I kept running into, and didn’t solve but managed to work around, was that certain options from within the Customization Tool caused an error:

Unable to Submit Changes, MSI Set Value failed, Error Code = 259.

I googled high and low, the full width and breadth of the Internet, and could find no answer. This was further complicated a bit by being an enterprise customer, so although our package said is was “Acrobat Professional DC” it was actually “Acrobat Professional 2015,” also known as the “Classic Track.” The slight version difference made getting the proper update package more complicated than it should have been, and may be contributing to the errors with the Customization Wizard.

In the end on the PC side I was able to change or disable most everything I wanted to in the installer. I ended up creating a simple batch file to run the Acrobat Setup program, which runs a passive install, then follow that immediately by the latest MSP update package. Although the update runs silently, the open window of the batch file is enough to let me know the computer is still processing the update. All of the seems to work well enough to do what I want.

On the Mac side, things were much easier for Acrobat, after a brief false start. Adobe does offer a Customization Wizard on the Mac side, but when attempting to use it the tool wants a serial number. As an enterprise customer, we don’t have one the way it wants it. So that was a bit of a dead end.

However, after getting our enterprise installer and the proper update package for Acrobat Professional 2015, I simply loaded everything into AirWatch and let our EMM system handle it. When loaded into Products on AirWatch and pushed down via a Files/Actions profile, the installer and update PKG file ran silently and flawless. That was definitely the way to go.