The recent Wave-D release of the Windows Intune service and the release of System Center 2012 Configuration Manager SP1 enables enterprise management of the Windows RT devices for customers using the Intune standalone management service or System Center Configuration Manager who have obtained a Windows Intune subscription for the management of mobile devices. Management capabilities specifically for Windows RT devices include features such as enrollment, registration, hardware inventory collection, compliance settings and software distribution.
This post contains the steps which you, as an IT administrator, can perform to troubleshoot and investigate software distribution (download and install) issues on the Windows RT client.
Assumptions
The user is able to enroll the Windows RT device to be managed by the Windows Intune Service on behalf of a Windows Intune Standalone or (Configuration Manager) SP1 account using the Company Apps control panel applet and by using their user credentials.
The user has installed the Company Apps Windows 8 style application from the Windows Store and is able to sign in into the application using their valid credentials which they used to enroll.
The enrolled user is able to view applications made available and published to them by their enterprise administrator (Windows Intune or System Center Configuration Manager administrator) and is able to view the details of these apps and request these apps from within the Company Apps Windows 8 style app installed from the Windows Store.
Investigating Issues
For each application requested by the user, there is an application job which is created in the local registry hive of the device under (HKCUSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionMDMJobDB ). Each application job will have a corresponding Job ID associated with it which will be present in this registry key.
The screenshot below displays the job status for an app which was successfully downloaded and installed by the client:
In the screenshot above notice that the reg key entry for the application job ID has a number of settings associated with it. Some of the important one’s are:
1) BITSId : The MDM Agent client exe on the Windows RT client leverages the BITS service running on the Windows RT device to download content from the content location and subsequently installs the content on the device. The BITS ID denotes the unique ID of the download job which the BITS service uses to track the download. Once BITS completes downloading the content it calls back to the MDMAgent exe on the device indicating that content download succeeded or failed.
2) DeployRetryCount : The number of times the content download was tried by BITS before succeeding or classifying the job as download failure.
3) CurrentDPUrl: The location from which content was last tried to be downloaded from.
4) LastError : The error code HRESULT indicating the error encountered while downloading / installing the application.
5) Status : Indicates the status of the application job. The following mapping defines what each of the possible status codes indicates:
Initialized /Created = 10
Download In Progress = 20
Download Failed = 30
Download Complete = 40
Install In Progress = 50
Install Failed = 60
Install Complete = 70
Troubleshooting Steps for Issues/Symptoms some common issues
Probable Cause : Most likely sideloading is not enabled on the device. The MDM Agent exe will not process any download / install jobs created until it detects that sideloading is enabled on the device.
Mitigation: To ensure that sideloading is enabled on the Windows RT device.
If this value is set to 0 that indicates sideloading isn’t enabled. Contact your enterprise admin and confirm that a valid sideloading key has been targeted by them to your Windows RT device.
Probable Cause : Job status 60 indicates that installation of the application failed after download.
Likely causes for this may be any from the list below.
The code signing certificate with which app was signed is not present on the device.
A framework dependency on which the application depends upon is not found installed on the device.
Mitigation:
Copy the package locally
Use the Add-AppxPackage powershell commandlet to attempt install of the application ( http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh856048 )
The error message which you get after executing the above PowerShell cmdlet will most likely indicate issues related to code signing or framework dependencies or package corruption.
Probable Cause : Job status 30 indicates that the download of the application failed.
Likely causes for this may be:
Mitigation:
Probable Cause :
HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionMDM key in the registry, the WNSChannelURi value in this case would be empty.
Mitigation:
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties and confers no rights.
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