Friday 28 August 2015

Windows 10 ADMX files

I came across this issue when after adding the Windows 10 group policy templates to the central store. Once the appropriate ADMX and ADML files are in place and the Group Policy Management Console is opened the error "'Microsoft.Policies.Sensors.WindowsLocationProvider' is already defined" appears when searching through the Administrative Templates settings.

Seems alarming at first but basically the LocationProviderADM.admx file was renamed as Microsoft-Windows-Geolocation-WLPAdm.admx in Windows 10, so when the files are copied to the store there are two files with the same settings but with different names

To resolve this, as per the KB article https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3077013 simply delete the LocationProviderADM admx and adml files, then rename the Microsoft-Windows-Geolocation-WLPAdm.admx and adml files to LocationProviderADM

Friday 14 August 2015

Lync 2010 client Toast issues

 

So my first post for some time is related to an issue on Lync 2010 on Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 not displaying a toast for incoming calls and IM's. The icon simply flashes orange in the system tray and sometimes not at all. I have not been able to find a fix online for this so I hope it helps someone else out there!

 

It would appear that going beyond certain levels of the DPI scaling in Windows causes this problem

 
 
 
It is well known that the DPI scaling feature within Windows 8.1 (not so sure about Windows 10 as I haven't tested it fully yet) can mess up the appearance of some applications giving a blurry effect. You can disable this on a per application basis by deploying the following registry setting via Group Policy;

Hive; HKEY_CURRENT_USER
Key Path; Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers
Value name; (Enter the full local file path to the executable)
Value type; REG_SZ
Value data; ~ HIGHDPIAWARE

If this is only an issue for a few users you can simply tick the following check box in the properties of the executable, under the compatibility tab;



I figured this may be related to the issue occurring with Lync 2010 so I tried it out on a few clients with the scaling set to 150% and it resolved the problem.

Interestingly this was also an issue for one of my colleagues who had carried out an in place upgrade to Windows 10 with the default display settings. Again the above resolved the issue, I will be testing this out further when we decide to roll out the pilot phase.