Trevelyan

Ok so the original guy at TV Licensing hadn't told me to enquire about "Multi licensing" - the next guy gave me a number for them. They've then discussed it, have no idea, passed it back to the guy who I think passed me to them. He now says "you've got a valid license so.. I'm not sure what to do. You've got a valid license".. I was then passed to another dude, probably more senior, who said there's no problem, just have to skip the signin part and we don't have to register. I said you do, he said no you don't, I was looking at iPlayer last night. I asked him to try it himself. His reply: "Oh yeah" Looks like this is something that has changed this morning, really. But odd we are the first education place to have contacted them about it. JISC are also on the case now I think, after we've been in touch with them about it. I imagine they would surely change this later so that, for example, JISC IPs are excluded from having to signin or whatnot. At least, I hope so!

TV Licensing were useless when I called; they said you need one license per room you're broadcasting in. And all students will have to share one account. Lovely. JISC time!

We already have a license but we have about 2800 students/1500 PCs. They can't all use the same email address!

Where I work, it looks like users now have to sign in to be able to access content on iPlayer - has anyone had any experience in how to get around this or is the strategy for everyone to register their own account in order to do this?

Overall, this sounds like a real pain to do. It clearly isn't something that Microsoft have given support for and it seems that theres a lot of scope for mess. I think we will stick to fixed layouts or partial layouts. Unless it all changes later!

Unfortunately, if users make changes they wont travel with the user when they move, right?

(For clarity - this is about the start layout and not the start menu. Start menu is not going to be redirected and we want to just do what we do with that anyway) We're looking at deploying a custom start layout for users. Exporting a layout and deploying it via GPO looks like it works well, albeit a few programs not showing up, but of course people can't then customise the menu by unpinning and moving things about. We really want to be able to give them a default menu that they can then customise if they want, but the partial start layout would probably be that bit too unintuitive for most users. The key thing is, however; has anyone got a nice way to actually make the start layout roam with users? Is it stored in somewhere nice that folder redirection would be able to help with? Customising their tiles would be completely useless if they don't keep that layout when moving anywhere else! One idea I had was a logoff script that exports their start menu to \\server\%username%\layout.xml and then have the Start Layout apply that file at login - but then they can't customise that in the first place.. seems a bit of a rubbish way to do it really. If anyone has any ideas or tips for how to make a default layout that people can change work, that'd be ace. Or at least, one that roams with them! Many thanks!

Right, solution within Windows (without externally blocking anything) is to disable (set to 4) the Appxsvc in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \System \CurrentControlSet \Services\Appsvc Any apps already installed then cannot be uninstalled, however, but combined with blocking the store, it then blocks Edge's ability to install stuff itself. Seems like a really messy and horrible fix but it really does but a definitive spanner in these works for app installation. (I think It's also worth changing the homepage in Edge and making new tabs have a blank screen. But that has to be done through a machine GPO for some bizarre reason)

I just read your thread from November on it.. insanity. You can't Applocker the store or anything else to counter it, but I asked about this on Technet too and someone acknowledged it there. It looks like the suggestion is to disable the AppXSvc but I haven't figured out how to do that. Even via GPO that service doesn't want to be disabled. If I can't fix this by our mass rollout date then yeah, it'll have to be blockerised.

Well you can still technically navigate there by going to both https://www.msn.com/spartan/dhp and https://www.msn.com/spartan/ntp They don't seem to have the same behaviour in Chrome or IE as they do in Edge, so it might be a built-in library that provides this functionality. I could just GPO block all links to ms-windows-store, though..

1703 and no, I can't - but it seems to just be the intial start page for Edge. If you follow the links to get to the store on the web, those will always try to access the store app. I'm wondering if this perhaps wasn't intentional; it sort of bypasses everything else and just allows installation of an App without having to go through the store (well, I have the Store blocked by end users so it clearly isn't using the store).

A bit dirty but a good idea - removing TrustedInstaller worked and now it hangs at 0% in the browser. You also get a notification saying that it had troubles installing it but it'll try again later. Will see how that works out.. I tried to block everything else in Applocker that *wasnt* Edge, but it didn't stop it. Edge just seems to have diplomatic immunity from any system policies for things like, you know, app installation..

So you actually have to block Edge itself, you can't just block its app-installing behaviour?

Looks like the SCCM installation was a bit broken. CCMExec.exe was corrupted and even the site reset wasn't helping. I restored a backup of the installation disk from a few months ago and all works fine now!

Nope to both unfortunately, no easy fix! I've tried https://www.windows-noob.com/forums/topic/6447-sccm-2012-pxe-point-reinstall/ - followed all steps, same issues persist. Thinking to try MS support!