Windows Imaging and Configuration Designer (ICD) / Windows ADK Insider Preview Build 15021 – Part 2 – Provisioning School Devices

Note: This is part 2 of a series of  posts.  I decided to break this topic up into multiple posts and to release a post a day to try and keep the content short(er) and retain-able.  Sometimes when we have a lot put in front of us all at once, an overly long blog post can be too much.  This way we can look at a section a day, and take the time to digest what we’ve read and seen.  

In today’s post we are going to visit the “Provision school devices” configuration.

When we select “Provision school devices” we are taken to a simple interface similar to the once we reviewed in the 1st post about “Simple provisioning“.   You can take a look at that post to get details on anything not covered here.

When we select the “Set up school settings” button we are presented with the following simple interface.  The “Take A Test” app functionality is part of Windows 10 Anniversary Edition and is required for the “kiosk” type testing mode.

Configure devices for shared use – This allows students to log on with their credentials or an anonymous account and store their data in the cloud.

Configure a test taking account – This is used to put the device into a “lock down” mode similar to a kiosk mode that is used for test taking.  You provide the account that will be used, and the URL to the test web address.  The URL can be a test created with Microsoft Office 365 Forms as part of the Education offering.

This link will provide details for test taking in Windows 10:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/edu/windows/take-tests-in-windows-10

Now lets take a look at some examples of the settings and how they get populated in the Advanced editor when we fill out the “Set up school settings” simple interface.

We can also take a look at the TemplateState.data file that is generated when we create one of the Provisioning profiles using the templates.

Here are the contents of the TemplateState.data file

If we take a look at this file, we will notice that just like in the simple interface, we have  a lot of the same data as we did in the Simple Provisioning profile.  We may also notice that we have substantially more data in there as well.  Now we can see all of the settings that actually get applied when you configure the “Setup school settings” page.

Although most of the settings seem to focus on utilizing a shared device, and two are even very specifically about “TakeATest”, there do seem to be some settings in here like “AllowAutoUpdate”, “AllowAllTrustedApps”, and more than a few others.

NOTE: It is important to note that the school settings package has to be applied during Windows First-Run.

Details on how to manually accomplish that task can be found in the link below:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/edu/windows/set-up-students-pcs-to-join-domain?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396

This provisioning package could also be applied using a deployment tool or injecting it directly into the WIM file.

In my next post we are going to review the “Advanced Provisioning” section of the Windows ICD tool.  In this post we will review the different sections within the Advanced editor and get into some of the things we can do outside of the simple interface.