How to automatically create and update Visio diagrams from Excel

To successfully create Visio diagrams from Excel, Visio Pro for Office 365 is required. Here you can see the prices or download trial.

  1. Open Excel (I have latest release of Excel from Office 365 suite)
  2. In the search box, type “process” and hit Enter. Among other search results, 2 Excel templates should appear with Excel icons in upper left corner and Visio diagrams in lower right corner. Select the one you want/need. I will continue with Process Map for Cross-Functional Flowchart.

  3. A nicely formatted Excel file will open with pretty much all info you need to know about Data Visualizer; the solution that allows us to create diagrams from Excel.

  4. Head over to Process Map worksheet.
  5. You’ll notice here we have “ProcessMapDataTable populated with 2 rows. This is the Excel Table that we need to work with. Everything else can be deleted/ignored.

  6. Remove the 2 rows added as examples and add your process’ field mappings. For this example, I will use Software Development process found on www.smartdraw.com
  7. I will modify my Excel Table based on this process. Here is my final Table:
Process Step ID Process Step Description Next Step ID Connector Label Shape Type Function Phase
P01 Start P02 Start Project Management Planning
P02 Gather requirements P03 Document Project Management Planning
P03 Develop specifications P04 Process Software Design Design
P04 Develop internal design P05 Process Software Design Design
P05 Develop external design P06 Process Software Design Design
P06 Change required? P05,P07 Yes,No Decision Software Design Design
P07 Define Development team P08 Subprocess Software Development Coding
P08 Application development P09 Process Software Development Coding
P09 User Acceptance Testing P10 Process Software Development Coding
P10 Quality Assurance P11 Process Software Development Coding
P11 Defects P08,P12 Yes,No Decision Software Development Coding
P12 Release to production P13 Subprocess Release Management Release
P13 Stop End Project Management Release

Make sure that you have more than one value in Next Step ID, you should have similar number of values/labels in Connector Label column and that those values match its corresponding step.

For example, P06 Step ID is a decision point. If changes are required (Yes), process goes back to P05 Step ID. If no changes are required (No), process proceeds to P07 Step ID.

Lastly, ensure your last process step has nothing in Next Step ID field, because it’s the last one, there is nothing else afterwards… process ends here. Save your Excel file.

  1. Open Visio.
  2. In the search box, type “data visualizer” and hit Enter. You should get the Basic and Cross-Functional templates. Select the same one you used for creating the Excel file. Cross-Functional Flowchart in my example.

    Just in case you started it wrongly or you want to get Excel template again, click Excel data template. Select your local Unit and click Create.

  3. Visio will open Create Diagram from Data wizard.
  4. Using first drop-down box, select the correct diagram type to use.
  5. In the second field, browse to the Excel file you created and saved in Step 7.
  6. In the last field, Visio should automatically recognize your Excel Table name, ProcessMapData in my example. Click Next.

  7. If you did not modified headers in the Excel Table, next page should automatically recognize and map Function and Phase columns. Expand More Options if you want to modify the order of column values. Assuming you created your process in a chronological order, you’d probably want to retain the same order in Visio.

  8. On the next wizard page the same, if you left all default column headers, Visio will automatically recognize and map needed columns. Otherwise, drag and drop the columns from the left.

    Short note here: you probably noticed your Excel Table has blue and green headers. Blue headers are required for these mappings and building your final diagram. Whether green columns are nice to have. All those columns may have valuable info for the diagram, but I think Microsoft still has ways for improvement this specific side, especially Alt Description, because it may contain too much text. Add something to this column and you will see what I’m referring to.

  9. Next page is about choosing your required Visio shapes. I did not have anything to modify or comment here. It seems like Microsoft is limiting the user to use predefined shapes but, anyway, default shapes are kind of standard so should be sufficient.

  10. The last wizard step is the one we need to modify to suit our needs. Make sure Next Step ID is selected for Specify Column Name, Relationship is set to Next Step, Delimiter is set to comma and Connector Label is mapped to its column with same name. Click Finish.

  11. You should now have a fully functional Visio diagram. Note that Visio will zoom it in such a way that it fits your page; if needed, zoom it in or out to see the details. Also, for some reason, Visio creates a lot of unused space between each shape. Feel free to rearrange everything to save space.

One nice thing about having this Excel file linked to Visio is that any updates you make to the process in Excel, you can refresh Visio diagram to update it with those changes. Just select your Visio diagram and from Data tab, in Create from Data group select Refresh.

For reading official Microsoft article about this, please take a look at “Create a Data Visualizer diagram” post. It contains more valuable info, including a description about each Excel columns that interact with Visio flowchart components.

Similarly, here’s a video made by Microsoft.

July 20, 2018: Microsoft just posted another, shorter, video on YouTube marketing same thing.

How to start Word with a specific template

  1. Open Word the usual way.
  2. In the template selection view, select the template you want and click Create. For example, Blog Post.
  3. When Word opened your document, click Save As and select Word Template in the Save as type drop-down box.

    Path should change automatically to your Custom Office Templates directory.
    Give your template a name. For example Blog, to keep it simple. At this point, you can close this document.

  4. On your Desktop or wherever you want, right click and select NewShortcut.

  5. In the location field, add full path to winword.exe file; default location for 2016 version is “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\root\Office16”. Also, you need to specify the location and name of your template file. Mine is in “D:\_Main Documents\Documents\Custom Office Templates” so my full path will be (including quotes and template name): “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\root\Office16\WINWORD.EXE” /t”D:\_Main Documents\Documents\Custom Office Templates\Blog.dotx”

    Make sure there is a space before /t switch and there is no space between the /t switch and template path. Click Next.

  6. Give your new shortcut a name; Blog from Word for example. Click Finish.

  7. Your new shortcut is now ready for use. Double click it and Word will open using your new template without asking anything else.

Optionally, it’s more a nice to have actually, you can personalize your shortcut with a custom icon so that you can quickly differentiate it from other Word files and shortcuts.

  1. Right click your new shortcut and select Properties.
  2. Click Change Icon… and browse to the location where you have an .ico (ICO file format is an image file format for Windows icons) file you want to use.

    If you do not have an icon to use, click Browse and in File name box type: %SystemRoot%\System32\SHELL32.dll
    Here you have quite a few old but good icons that you can choose from. Select one icon and click OK twice.

  3. Your shortcut is now fully customized and ready for use.

How to use Word for Blog publishing

  1. Start your Office Word application. It works with any version starting with Word 2007.
  2. While you’re in the new template selection view, search for “blog” in the “Search for online templates” field.

  1. Blog post” template should be listed. Click it and then select Create button.

  2. On first run only, you’ll be asked to register your blog in Word. You can click Register Now and walk through this process or you can click Register Later and do it later by using Manage Accounts from Blog command group.

  3. If you clicked Register Now, you’ll be asked to select your blog provider. You see that this list does not include all possible blogging platforms, that’s kind of normal I’d say…, but you have the Other option and you then can add any blog details as long as you know the link to provider’s API.

    I selected WordPress because this is what I have.

  4. Next screen will ask for your blog’s URL. And, this is different from platform to platform but, for WordPress you need to provide the link to your xmlrpc.php file. It is usually in your root folder of your site but if it is in another folder, make sure to add the correct path.

    For default location, just paste your site’s address between the backslashes, thus replacing <Enter your blog URL here> with your blog’s URL.

    Add your username and password. Optionally, select Remember Password if you’re the only one who’s using your Windows account. If there are more people using same Windows account, to prevent others posting funny things to your blog, leave this option unchecked.

    Under Picture Options, you can select where your post’s pictures will be uploaded to. For simplicity, keep it as My blog provider.

  5. Once you have all fields completed, hit OK.

  6. If everything was done correctly and Word could connect to your blog, you’ll be presented with a nice confirmation message.
  7. Next, you’ll have your Word template changed to Blog. Notice Blog command group. It contains all your basic needs for creating and publishing blog posts. One thing is missing though, ability to add Tags.

    If you have a more complex blog, photography maybe or e-commerce, or if you use Featured Images or you need to add Location to your posts, probably Word is not that much suitable to you.

  8. From Insert tab, you have access to add a lot of items to your post, like images, shapes, tables etc.. As an example, below picture has Rounded Corners style added.

Below is a shape added from Word, it will be posted as a picture:

 

Just in case something went wrong and you have issues connecting to your blog or uploading images, please take a look at Microsoft’s article about this, scroll down to the bottom for troubleshoot problems.

Creating an e-book. Part 2.

Following on from previous post about creating an e-book, today we will make that “black on white” text look nicer and we will do it using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).

I will not detail on what CSS is because this is not the purpose of this post. If you need to refresh your knowledge, please head over to W3School’s page.

Very shortly though, CSS helps HTML look nicer and it does so by defining how each HTML element should be displayed in a browser.

By now, we know that an e-book is basically HTML. Plain HTML documents can be read by most browsers in the same way, which is not the case about e-books. Because e-books can be read on e-readers, computers, tablets, phones etc., screen sizes will differ, same will font size, page width etc. With this in mind, we need to ensure that we use relative sizes and not sizes in pixel (PX); so we’ll use either percentage (%) or em (EM).

    Quoting W3Schools: What is the difference between PX, EM and Percent?

Pixel is a static measurement, while percent and EM are relative measurements. The size of an EM or percent depends on its parent. If the text size of body is 16 pixels, then 150% or 1.5 EM will be 24 pixels (1.5 * 16). Look at CSS Units for more measurement units.

Again, very shortly, 1em equals to current device’s font size, 100%. 1.5em will be 150% of current font size. 2em will be 200%…, you got the idea.

Although we can add CSS properties and selectors inside .html file, we will create a separate .css file and will link it from .html file. This way, you can very easily use same CSS file as template for other books, instead of copy/pasting specific text from inside .html file.

OK, let’s open a blank notepad file and save it as epub.css in the same folder where mybook.html. Let’s add one additional line to our .html file so that it knows where to look for this .css file.

Right click mybook.html file and open it with notepad. Add one new line after <meta> and before <title> tags and add: <link rel=”stylesheet” href=”epub.css” />

[code language=”html”]
<meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="epub.css" />
<title>My Book’s Title</title>
[/code]

As mentioned previously, out of all HTML tags, we will use Headings and Paragraphs the most in any e-book, throughout the entire book. Let’s then start with defining Headings because we need them for Chapter titles and subtitles. Again, using CSS we can design our HTML to look awesome and each of you will have your own definition of awesome and, why not, design skills, which I surely lack.

Let’s say in our e-book we want Chapter Title to be 1) aligned to the right and 2) have an additional 2 free lines from the previous block of text. To accomplish all this, in our epub.css file we will write below code for h2:

[code language=”css”]
h2 {
text-align:right;
margin-top:2em;
}
[/code]

Save .css file and leave it open. Now open mybook.html in a browser. See how our Chapter Title changed from left to right and the space before and after it? Just to show you how easy it is to change something using CSS, let’s say we want Chapter Title to be in red… in epub.css add color:red; text on the next line after margin-top:2em;. Save the file and then refresh html file in your browser. Your title should now be in red.

Now think about it a little. What if you would have a book with hundreds of pages, with hundreds of Chapter Titles? With one line added the CSS file, you changed the look of all Chapter Titles. How cool is that?! Let your imagination flow and modify your CSS file as you wish to make your e-book look great!

Ok, before going on, let’s remove the line with red color, unless you want to leave it of course.

Regarding Chapter Subtitles, let’s say we want them also 1) right-aligned but 2) style should be italic. Below is the code to make this happen:

[code language=”css”]
h3 {
text-align:right;
font-style:italic;
}
[/code]

Regarding paragraphs, as you recall, I added 3 paragraphs in my .html file; I did this because I wanted to show you 3 different examples of paragraphs modified through CSS styles. So, let’s make all default paragraphs justified, first line indented by 2em, without any margins on left or right (because we want to use as much space as possible) but we do want to have a little bit of size before next paragraph starts. Here’s how we can accomplish this:

[code language=”css”]
p {
text-indent:2em;
text-align:justify;
margin:0em;
margin-bottom:0.25em;
}
[/code]

Next, we will also use a paragraph but with a purpose. For example, when we will want to quote something or add few lines of text that is totally different from other paragraphs etc. We’ll make it center aligned, italic and will add some space before and after so that it is visible and distinguished.

[code language=”css”]
p.quote {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0.5em;
margin-bottom:0.5em;
font-style:italic;
}
[/code]

In the above code you will notice a small addition to our CSS style. By adding p.quote, we’re just specifying that any paragraph with quote
class, should have these additional changes applied (for example, if we will not add text-align:center;, this paragraph will remain justified because this is what text-align for all paragraphs says).

If you’re more curious… similarly, if you will add only .quote for example, that means any HTML tag where you will add quote class will have those changes applied.

Seems easy and straightforward to me. Again, think about how easy you can modify an entire book?! You can take same .html file and only make changes in the CSS file to get a completely different book. Think about how easy you can create books for readers with low vision, blindness or visual impairments! Try and play with the menu from W3Schools and you’ll be amazed of what you can do with CSS.

For last paragraph mainly I want to make you interested in “what else can I do easily?”. Let’s modify only first paragraph in any chapter so that it has a visual delimiter from Chapter Subtitle.

[code language=”css”]
p.first {
margin-top:1em;
}
[/code]

At this point, I have defined my 3 paragraphs like this: First is first obviously; Second is a quotation-like and Third is just a normal paragraph. Here is my html code inside <body> tags (I’ve cut the text in code to make it shorter but it is visible in the screenshot in its full width):

[code language=”html”]
<body>
<h2>Lorem Ipsum</h2>
<h3>What is Lorem Ipsum?</h3>
<p class="first">Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.</p>
<p class="quote">Nullam tortor orci, dictum id vulputate ut, sagittis vel arcu.</p>
<p>Curabitur ligula tortor, ullamcorper placerat commodo eu, efficitur ut dui.</p>
</body>
[/code]

Here’s my webpage in IE:

Creating an e-book. Part 1.

As explained in Ok, E-Books post, this topic became of an interest just recently. I have never created an e-book so you will not see me saying that I’m usually doing it this way or that way or other crap like this. No, cards on the table. I’m just as curious as you are about e-books; I read quite a few online articles and even bought an e-book about how to create an e-book…

Following that book I was able to turn one of my procedure document from work into a fully working e-book. I uploaded it to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing and it din’t complain at all. At KDP I reached the step where I could download a sample book file to see how it will look like. So, it works. fine In these series of posts, I’m just trying to put down the steps needed to create a simple e-book in .epub format. You’ll be free to further enhance it as much as your design and HTML skills are.

Just so this is clear from the beginning, an e-book is just a transformed XHTML, CSS and XML files. Because few people may not know what XHTML is, I quickly wrote HTML vs XHTML post yesterday. Regarding XML, I will show you later what it is for and how to create it.

Before we start, I’d like to tell those few basic HTML tags that we will use. I want you to understand  them, not just using them blindly.

  • Headings are defined with the <h1> to <h6> tags, with <h1> being the biggest heading and <h6> the smallest. Headings are really-really important because they will define your book’s Table of Contents. We will not use <h1> for Book Title mainly because we don’t need Book Title in the Table of Contents; we will use <h2> for Chapter Titles and <h3> for Chapter Subtitles.
  • A paragraph is defined using <p> tag only. We’ll see later how we can have differently formatted paragraphs using CSS.
  • We will also use <div> tag for other HTML elements, specifically when we will want to define specific blocks or divisions of text.
  • We will also use CSS a lot to format different blocks of text and images.

With that said, let’s get started.

  1. First and foremost, you need to write something. An article, a novel, something. Or take any document that you can test with. Format doesn’t matter now, it can be a text file, word file, anything.
  2. Again, we’ll use XHTML Strict so our html file will be well formatted. Initial code is nothing fancy, just basic html code. Copy below code to a notepad file and save it as mybook.html in a new folder [leave notepad file open]. Below is what I have so far in my file. Note that I added “My Book’s Title” as a page title, see line 7.

    [code language=”html” highlight=”7″]
    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
    <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en">

    <head>
    <meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type" />
    <title>My Book’s Title</title>
    </head>

    <body>

    </body>
    </html>
    [/code]

  3. Suppose you have your manuscript by hand. To start with, copy the contents of one chapter only and paste it exactly inside the <body> tag. Save the file.

    [code language=”html”]
    <body>
    Paste your first Chapter here.
    </body>
    [/code]

  4. Go to the folder where you have mybook.html file and double click it so that it opens in your default browser.
  5. For testing purposes, I used www.lipsum.com website to generate 3 paragraphs of dummy text. I placed this text inside the <body> tag and saved the file. If I run mybook.html now, my browser will show nothing except clear text; no breaks, no new lines, nothing.
    This is because we need to tell our browser where to start a new line, a new paragraph, where to put a heading and so on. This is done using tags described in the beginning.
  6. Next, we’ll add your chapter’s title and paragraphs. Going back to your notepad file, right where your chapter title begins, add <h2> tag. Where your chapter title ends, add </h2>. Backslash key is to tell the browser that here we are closing the previously opened tag, <h2> in our case.
    Now, if you have chapter subtitles, do something similar. Right before your chapter subtitle starts, add <h3> tag. Where your chapter subtitle ends, add </h3>.
    Similarly, where your paragraph starts, add <p> tag. Where your paragraph ends, close the tag with </p>. Do the same for all other paragraphs you have. Save the file and run it again in your browser. Looks nicer, isn’t it? Here’s what I have:As you can see, there seems to be a default space between chapter title, subtitle and the paragraphs. Also, everything is left centered and there are no other formatted elements. This is what we will work on in the next post.

HTML vs XHTML

Ever wondered what HTML and XHTML is about? Long and official story can be found at W3Schools. Short story, below.

Simply put, XHTML is the same as HTML but stricter. There are rules in place that one must follow. You are no longer allowed to leave tags unclosed or place them wherever you want. And guess what, the only beneficiary from following these rules, is you, the web developer. Because your site will then be supported by most of the browsers out there; definitely more than your badly formatted HTML is today.

Quoting W3Schools, the most important differences from HTML are listed below.
Please visit W3Schools post to see examples of good vs bad code.

Document Structure

  • XHTML DOCTYPE is mandatory
  • The xmlns attribute in <html> is mandatory
  • <html>, <head>, <title>, and <body> are mandatory

XHTML Elements

  • XHTML elements must be properly nested
  • XHTML elements must always be closed
  • XHTML elements must be in lowercase
  • XHTML documents must have one root element

XHTML Attributes

  • Attribute names must be in lower case
  • Attribute values must be quoted
  • Attribute minimization is forbidden

How to convert from HTML to XHTML

  1. Add an XHTML <!DOCTYPE> to the first line of every page
  2. Add an xmlns attribute to the html element of every page
  3. Change all element names to lowercase
  4. Close all empty elements
  5. Change all attribute names to lowercase
  6. Quote all attribute values

Moreover, these guys also developed a website where you can validate your page to be XHTML (and not only) compliant. They will also tell you exactly what you did wrong and how to correct. And don’t worry, it’s free! It only costs your willingness to do it the right way.

Ok, e-books

Let’s start with some bullshit talk to tell you how this topic started. Feel free to skip it if you’re not curious.
Personally, I’m not the kind of person who reads books not related to IT; think I can count all books I read throughout my lifetime and there are no more than 10, but this is not something to be proud of. Anyway, since all my books are IT related and I mainly read them in front of a computer, after having some sleep issues last year, I decided I need to read something else before going to bed. Well, before falling asleep… So, I bought a Kindle e-book reader, yey!

Next issue, what a hell to read?! My wife only reads crime novels, so she couldn’t help in this matter. Although I thought about reading what she reads, mainly to see if she’ll prepare me something to eat from a crime book we’re good though, just had our 9th wedding anniversary!
I remember that when I was a kid I read something from Jules Verne, in Russian, and I liked it… Searching the web for some e-books I found a very nice webstore (www.bestseller.md) from Moldova that offers lots of free e-books. I downloaded a few and started reading in bed. That’s what I started with, Jules verne. It was so boring, I started falling asleep within minutes; mission accomplished!
After few chapters things started to get interesting in the book so I was reading more and more each day. I finished the book and I was proud of my fantastic achievement, lol.

I started the second book, also from Jules Verne, downloaded from same website (thanks, guys!). Here things started moving from reading side to IT side… mainly because first book I read had a nice handy feature that let me know how many minutes I have from current chapter or book. The second one, didn’t. It only said how much I have till end of the book. Well, well, well… why, what’s wrong?! I started digging… and this means I was no longer reading before going to bed, instead I was web-ing over this issue. Apparently, this second .mobi file was not formatted properly, specifically its chapters. Hmm…

Reading more and more about e-books, and how they’re created and published, seemed interestingly so I started testing how this works. I found no real step by step guide on how to do it. Lot’s of general articles covering this on a high level with steps to follow, blah, blah and in the end asking you to buy their e-books where they explain everything step by step. Well, gracias, what can I say.

Then I stumbled upon one publisher’s website with some info online (posted way back in 2013) and the rest of it in the e-book sold on Amazon (updated in January 2018). It was cheap, so I bought it. Of course, my eagle eyes immediately found many typos and errors in the book, that I emailed author about but… anyway, let’s get back to the point. Overall, that book is enough to get you started. Since I’m an IT guy, it was easy for me to understand everything, especially HTML and CSS things. Reading that book, I understood that this is what an e-book is all about – HTML, CSS and some XML. In fact, did you know that if you take an .epub file and change the extension to .zip, you will have an archive with everything in it (css file, html file, table of contents etc.)!? When I found out about it, I felt just like I did last decade – holy cow! This was when Microsoft first introduced their new XML based files (docx, xlsx etc.), and someone showed in a training that if you rename .docx to .zip, you get a nice structured zip file. technology, I love it!
Enough talking, let’s get started. Head of over to my next post, Creating an e-book. Part 1.

Getting back online

After many years, giving this blog a rebirth.

I lost my backup files and only found very few posts and those mainly about ConfigMgr 2012. Will post them below anyway; better few than nothing.

Next planned articles will be about e-books and plain html maybe, we shall see Smile Stay tuned!

Also need to create/update “About” page. Things have happened, so to speak… jobs changed, places changed etc.

Object Replication Manager failed to process Object changes.

Symptoms

Did your SMS_OBJECT_REPLICATION_MANAGER component shows a lot or 6004 MessageIDs with the following description: “Object Replication Manager failed to process Object changes. These changes will be retried on next processing cycle.?

Cause

By design, maybe.

Resolution

Run the following query in SQL Management Studio (Warning! modifying the database directly may not be supported by Microsoft. Do this on your own risk.):

SELECT ca.UniqueID,c.CollectionName
FROM vClientSettingsAssignments as ca LEFT JOIN collections AS c ON ca.CollectionID=c.SiteID
WHERE CollectionName = NULL

This will show collection name/s for all active assignments to collection/s that do not exist anymore.

If you have any, copy the UniqueID and run the following query:

DELETE FROM vClientSettingsAssignments
WHERE UniqueID = ‘{UniqueId here}’

Credit goes to: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/2e9ba246-194d-47d4-adc9-eb3b1717bfdc/object-replication-manager-failed-to-process-object-changes?forum=configmanagergeneral

Step-by-step guide to install Configuration Manager 2012 SP1 R2

Steps to perform on primary domain controller (DC)

Extend AD schema

  1. Log in using a domain admin account
  2. Insert ConfigMgr 2012 SP1 DVD
  3. Open a command prompt window
  4. Type D:\SMSSETUP\BIN\X64\EXTADSCH.EXE and press Enter. Wait for a confirmation message in CMD window and then check for the existence of ExtADSch.log file in the root of C: partition on the DC. Open the file and see if “Successfully extended the Active Directory schema.” message is present.

Assign permission to System OU in AD

  1. Open Active Directory Users and Computers
  2. From the View menu select Advanced Features
  3. Right click on the System container and select Properties
  4. Go to Security tab and click Advanced
  5. Click Add in the Permission tab
  6. Select Object Types and check the box for Computers. Click OK
  7. In the Enter the object name to select field enter the name of the ConfigMgr server and click Check Names
  8. After the server name is recognized, click Ok
  9. In the Permission Entry for System window check the box for Full control and select This object and all descendant objects in the Apply to list box. Click OK three times to close all open windows

Create service accounts

  1. Open ADUC and create the following 3 service accounts (select complex password for each account):
    1. SQL Server Service Accountsqlsrvacct
    2. ConfigMgr Client Push Service Accountcfgmgrclpush
    3. ConfigMgr Network Access Service Accountcfgmgrnetacct
  2. Make cfgmgrclpush account member of Domain Admins group or Workstation Admins group if this exists.

Create GPO to add security groups to local Administrators group on servers and workstations

  1. Server local admins
  2. Workstation local admins

Steps to perform on Configuration Manager server

Install Report Viewer 2008 SP1 Redistributable

  1. Login with a domain admin account, preferably not Administrator.
  2. Download and install Report Viewer 2008 SP1 Redistributable from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?familyid=BB196D5D-76C2-4A0E-9458-267D22B6AAC6&displaylang=en

Add Server Features

  1. Open Server Manager and add the following features:
    1. NET Framework 3.5.1 Features, BITS, Group Policy Management and Remote Differential Compression
    2. From Web Server (IIS) select WebDAV Publishing, ASP.NET, ASP, Windows Authentication, Dynamic Content Compression and IIS 6 WMI Compatibility

Configure WebDAV

  1. Open Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager
  2. Expand server name and select Default Web Site
  3. Double click on the WebDAV Authoring Rules and select Enable WebDAV from the right side panel
  4. From the right side, click Add Authoring Rule
  5. In the Add Authoring Rule window select the checkboxes for: All Content, All Users, Read and click OK
  6. From the right side, click WebDAV Settings
  7. Modify the following components as follows and click Apply when finished:
    1. Allow anonymous property queries – True
    2. Allow custom properties – False
    3. Allow property queries with infinite depth – True
    4. Allow hidden files to be listed – True

Add SQL Server ports exceptions

  1. Open Windows Firewall with Advanced Security
  2. Right click Inbound Rules and select New rule
  3. In the New Inbound Rule Wizard window make the following modifications:
    1. Rule Type – Port
    2. Protocol and Ports – TCP, Specific local ports: 1433
    3. Action – Allow the connection
    4. Profile – no modification
    5. Name – SQL TCP 1433
  4. Repeat step 3 to add another inbound rule with the following settings:
    1. Rule Type – Port
    2. Protocol and Ports – TCP, Specific local ports: 4022
    3. Action – Allow the connection
    4. Profile – no modification
    5. Name – SQL TCP 4022

Install SQL Server 2012 SP1

  1. Insert SQL Server 2012 SP1 DVD
  2. Select New SQL Server stand-alone installation
  3. Select features: Database Engine Services, Reporting Services – Native, Client Tools Connectivity, Management Tools, Integration Services (optional)
  4. Select default instance
  5. Add sqlsrvacct domain account to the local Administrators group on the ConfigMgr server
  6. Use the SQL service account for all SQL Server services
  7. Set SQL Server Browser to Automatic
  8. Add current user as the SQL Administrator (preferably not domain Administrator account)
  9. After installation, open Management Studio and configure maximum memory allocation.

Install Windows Deployment Services

  1. Open Server Manager and install the Windows Deployment Services role using the default settings

Install Windows Server Update Services

  1. Open Server Manager and select the Windows Server Update Services role. Click Next twice and then Install
  2. Install WSUS using the following settings:
    1. Select Update Source – select a disk with more disk space
    2. Database options – Use an existing database server on this computer
    3. Web Site Selection – Create a Windows Server Update Services 3.0 SP2 Web Site (http://servername:8530)
  3. When installation is finished, close the wizard by pressing Cancel button
  4. Create a Group Policy Object for windows update settings.
  5. If you have Windows Server 2008 R2, install KB2720211
  6. If you have Windows Server 2008 R2, install KB2734608

Install Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit (ADK) for Windows 8.1

  1. Download Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit (Windows ADK) for Windows 8.1 from Microsoft website http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=39982
  2. Select to install only the following:
    1. Deployment Tools
    2. Windows PE
    3. USMT

Install Configuration Manager 2012 SP1

  1. Insert Configuration Manager 2012 SP1 DVD
  2. Click Install link Configuration Manager 2012 SP1 Setup Wizard window.
  3. Install ConfigMgr and make only the following modifications:
    1. Available Setup Options – Install a Configuration Manager site server
    2. Updated Prerequisite Components – Check for updates and download…
    3. Site and Installation Settings – enter a Site code and Site name

Install Configuration Manager 2012 R2

  1. Insert Configuration Manager 2012 R2 CD
  2. Click Configuration Manager 2012 R2 link from the Install section
  3. Install the R2 add-on accepting the default settings in the wizard

Configure Configuration Manager as needed

Deploy Configuration Manager 2012 R2 hotfix to Clients using your preferred method and settings.