Windows 10 – Remove Windows Store Applications (appx)

Even if you start installing a Windows 10 Enterprise (SAC) operating system there is still a bunch of applications installed you really don’t need in an enterprise environment. There are two ways of getting rid of these. First thing you can do is to disable the “Microsoft Consumer Experiences” (Application Set) that are automatically installed during the system deployment. That is the easiest way to get rid of apps like “Candy Crush” or “Xing”.

To get rid of the rest of applications like “Weather” & “Xbox” there is only one way to do that. You need to build a PowerShell script that is executed during your OS deployment. Eventhough the removing commands for appx packages are supported by Microsoft some applications are still not removed from the user interface completelly. I recommend to run the script during the OS deployment to avoid these kind of problems. If you start removing appx packages after the first user login sometimes the app will be removed completelly but the icon will stay in the start menu as long as you delete the user profile.

1. Hide Applications by Group Policy Settings

Open/Create a new group policy object in the “Group Policy Management Editor”
Navigate to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Cloud Content
Click on “Turn off Microsoft consumer experience“
Switch the status of the policy to enabled.

Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Cloud Content

Windows 10 – Get & Export installed Updates

Sometimes it’s good to know which updates are installed on your client. Of course you can choose the regular way via the GUI elements of Windows but than you have no possibilities to export your result for filtering or reporting.

There are different ways to achieve that

Option 1 – CMD WMI querry
Option 2 – PowerShell
Option 3 – DISM

Windows 10 / Office 2016 – KMS Activation

Required Windows Server Updates

The following update is required for Windows 10 activation:

Windows Server 2012 R2 / KB3173424 – https://support.microsoft.com/kb/3173424
Windows Server 2012 / KB3173426 – https://support.microsoft.com/kb/3173426

The following update is required for Office 2016 activation:

Microsoft Office 2016 Volume License Pack – https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=49164&751be11f-ede8-5a0c-058c-2ee190a24fa6

Windows 10 / Server 2016 requires at least a KMS server based on Windows Server 2012. Activation via Windows Server 2008 R2 is not possible!

Activation by Command Line

Step 1

Type the following command to integrate your volume license key to the KMS server.

C:\Windows\System32>cscript slmgr.vbs /ipk XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXX
Microsoft (R) Windows Script Host Version 5.8
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
Installed product key XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXX successfully.

If the key isn’t accepted by the server you will receive the error 0xC004F015.

For Windows 10 LTSB 1607 the Licence key “Windows Server 2016 Datacenter” is valid.

PowerShell – General Logging Script

Working in enterprise environments always requires a confidential log for scripting actions implemented in productive stages and even for testing it could be a great advantage. PowerShell offers a great possibility to log every action executed by a script. The CMDlets Start-Transcript & Stop-Transcript will help you to achieve a successful logging script.

This will be just an example how you can easyly create a logging script. There are thousands of different ways to solve this. The Microsoft documentation can be found in the following link https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.powershell.host/start-transcript?view=powershell-5.1

The following script will write a general log file to C:\temp\logging.log containing all relevant basis information about the script execution.

Start-Transcript -path "C:\temp\logging.log" -Force

<# 
your CODE here
#>

Stop-Transcript

Result Read more