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Monthly Archives: February 2014

Set the Office 2013 Theme with Group Policy

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Who in Microsoft decided that the white theme in Office 2013 should be the default? It is almost blindingly bright! I now know what was inside the Ark of the Covenant and why Indiana Jones had to shut his eyes!

Setting the Office 2013 Theme with Group Policy

“Outlook 2013 makes my eyes bleed!”

But all joking aside, let’s set the Office 2013 Theme with Group Policy and prevent some melted faces!

In order to configure the Office 2013 theme with Group Policy, your machines will need the update for KB 2727096 installed. This update can be found here. Once downloaded, open an administrative command prompt and type: mso2013-kb2727096-fullfile-x86-glb.exe /extract . If you didn’t download the English update, be sure to change your EXE name. Save the EXE contents to a network location.

Open your Office 2013 GPO. If you don’t have one, see this article on settings that you might want to include. Add in your extract MSI so that it is installed at startup by GPSI. Your machines will need to reboot once to install this update and once again for it to apply.

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Adding BIOS Updates to Your Imaging Process

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Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from Matt Robertson

I am quickly learning that there are multiple ways to achieve the desired result within MDT. I set out to add BIOS updates to my task sequence and found a few posts that walked you through this. The steps in this article got me most of the way but it needed tweaking. In this article, we will cover adding BIOS updates to your Task Sequence. These will only update if the BIOS does not have the latest version that you have downloaded!

Prework: Organizing Your BIOS Updates

I used the same basic setup that I learned from the link above. I created a folder under my Applications folder in my Deployment share, named Dell. Under the Dell folder, I created a folder for each model of computer we have.

Adding BIOS Updates to Your Imaging Process

Under each of these folders I download the latest BIOS update for the corresponding model. I then rename the executable BIOSUpdate.exe and create a .txt file named with the version to make sure I don’t get confused. An example is below:

Adding BIOS Updates to Your Imaging Process

Once this prework is done, open the Deployment Workbench and edit your task sequence as follows.

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