Winget supports now offline download - BUT Microsoft Store for business retires at August 15th 2024

Great news on the one hand side including bad news on the other hands side!

Its great to see that the Winget command download feature is now fully supported! Over 10 months ago Winget got the download support feature. But the store backend was not able to respond upon the requests. This is now fixed.

At the same time Microsoft decided to retire very soon the Store for Business at August 15th 2024. Here in Central Europe we have currently vacation season so this is really a great surprise and pressure for all SCCM admins taking advantage of the Store for Business to download apps. And there are now a ton of apps you have to take care of especially the built-in ones from Microsoft just think of Photos, Paint, New Teams just to mention a few of them.

For the full blogpost see here:
Downloading Microsoft Store apps using Windows Package Manager - Microsoft Community Hub

And for the commands see here:
winget download command | Microsoft Learn

Huge additional challenge for automation is you need a logged in Entra ID account or you get prompted with the standard Entra ID authentication.

You need to have one of these roles:

• Global Administrator
• User Administrator
• License Administrator

And there is still another drawback which is also not easy to fix for Microsoft itself as this information is dependent from software vendors as well. You do not see the version information of the software available from the store. So you may need to download first every couple weeks the potential update and then afterwards check the version as you see the version as part of the downloaded filename only.

Just continue my research how to fully automate this process. So check back soon.

SCCM ConfigMgr Client Health

When you operate your client in an enterprise environment, then you may find from time to time clients in an unhealty condition. E.g. SCCM reporting does not work anymore or other issues around WMI originating from a corrupt WMI repository and much more.


The tech fellow Anders Rodland created a fantastic PowerShell based framework to diagnose and heal your (sccm) clients automatically.

Features

ConfigMgr Client Health detects and fixes following errors:

• ConfigMgr client is not installed.
• ConfigMgr client is assigned the correct site code.
• ConfigMgr client is upgraded to current version if not at specified minimum version.
• ConfigMgr client not able to forward state messages to management point.
• ConfigMgr client stuck in provisioning mode.
• ConfigMgr client maximum log file size.
• ConfigMgr client cache size. Fixed size (MB) or percentage of disk space.
• ConfigMgr client certificate error.
• ConfigMgr client hardware inventory not running.
• ConfigMgr client CcmSQLCE.log exists and client is not in debug mode.
• Corrupt WMI.
• DNS server record matches local IP’s
• Drivers – Reports faulty or missing drivers on client.
• Logging to SQL database and / or file share
• Pending reboot check
• User-friendly reboot of computer with 3rd party reboot app when in pending reboot or computer uptime is more than specified in config.
• Services for ConfigMgr client is not running or disabled.
• Other services can be specified to start and run and specific state.
• Windows Update Agent not working correctly, causing client not to receive patches.
• Windows Update Agent missing patches that fixes known bugs.
• PLUS additional ones in the latest version (check it out!)

More Information's can be found here:
https://www.andersrodland.com/configmgr-client-health/

And the latest "ConfigMgrClient Health" can be found on Github:
https://github.com/AndersRodland/ConfigMgrClientHealth

How to check for generic devices in Windows

When you check your computer management console in devices you may find something like this here:

to get more arround this you should open the properties of this device and check:


1. Click on Details
2. Select under Properties "Hardware IDs"
3. Now you should see something like this here:
(As my own notebook is missing the unknown device I just used the properties of another device. But it is the same procedure and does not matter if the device is known or unknown).

Here the stuff after PCI\VEN is the key. In PCI language this is the manufacturer code of the device. This is what we need:


PCI\VEN_10EC&DEV_5227(ignore the rest for now)


VEN = Vendor ID = 10EC (as example in relation to the picture above!)
&DEV = Device ID = 5227 (as example in relation to the picture above!)


Know you are looking in a web database for its meaning.


Visit www.pcidatabase.com and check seach in the Vendor field for: 10EC or the Vendor in your case which may vary (e.g. 8086)

After you found the manufacturer you can click on its name.

This brings you to this Website where you have a list of all known Device IDs from the manufacturer.

Please Keep in mind that this list is not sorted.

Therefore please use CTRL+F and use the search function of your browser to look for the device ID (in my example I would look for 0x5227  (0x which tells you and the System it is hex-decimal number).

When you know what is the right Vendor and device you have a good Chance to identify the right driver on the vendors support page.


This here is a 90% solution. There is also a chance that the device is either not in this list or the vendor does not provide a Driver for your OS.


Depending on the Driver it might be that a Windows 7 or 8/8.1 Driver might also work on Windows 10. Some Driver types have an unchanged Driver model behind. But it allways depend. Try out the new Driver. Just in case you are able to rollback to the driver before.

Good luck!