Anyone who has worked with SCCM OS deployment for the last several years is thrilled with an early Christmas present this year: the Task Sequence wizard finally has a Back button (ok, it’s actually “Previous” but you get the point)!!  I personally cannot count how many times I’ve PXE booted a machine and entered the TS wizard password only to see an error stating that no policy was found for the computer…or selected a Task Sequence only to receive an error stating it was unable to locate some content referenced in the Task Sequence (usually something that wouldn’t have actually been needed anyway).  After checking the logs and heading back to the console to remediate the issue, the only course of action was to reboot the system and try again.

Until now!

Picture if you will the common scenario described above. I PXE boot my system and enter the password…

…I select my Task Sequence…

…and I’m told I forgot to add something to the Distribution Point.

In this case, it was the OS image. Silly me…

Not to worry, I simply click the “Previous” button and I’m right back to the beginning!

Select the TS again, and I’m off and running

Same thing is true if no Task Sequence is found for the device. Simply hit “Previous,” take care of the issue in SCCM, and it will re-check for policies.

While it’s technically still just in preview and has yet to make it into an official release, this change has been a long time coming and will no doubt be a popular one.  Just think, some day we’ll be able to tell our green Tier 1 techs about the days when you had to reboot to just to get the Task Sequence to re-evaluate policies and dependencies…