Book Image

Mastering the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit

By : Jeff Stokes, Manuel Singer
Book Image

Mastering the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit

By: Jeff Stokes, Manuel Singer

Overview of this book

Topic The Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) provides a comprehensive collection of tools, processes, and guidance for automating desktop and server deployments. It considerably reduces deployment time and standardizes desktop and server images. Moreover, MDT offers improved security and ongoing configuration management. Microsoft Deployment Toolkit is the official supported method of creating and customizing Windows images for deployment. Description: Starting from scratch, this book walks you through the MDT setup, task sequence creation, and image deployment steps in detail. Breaking down the various MDT concepts, this book will give you a thorough understanding of the deployment process. Beginning with imaging concepts and theory, you will go on to build a Microsoft Deployment Toolkit environment. You will understand the intricacies of customizing the default user profile in different versions of Windows. Driver handling can be a challenge for larger organizations; we’ll cover various driver concepts including mandatory driver profiles. ]Other important topics like the User State Migration Tool (USMT), configuration of XML files, and how to troubleshoot the USMT are also discussed in the book. We will cover the verifier and Windows Performance Toolkit for image validation scenarios. Furthermore, you will learn about MDT web frontend implementation as well as how to utilize the database capabilities of MDT for deeper deployment options. We’ll wrap it all up with some links to resources for more information, blogs to watch, and useful Twitter handles.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
4
4. Default User Profile Customization

Customizing the image

You may customize the image before running your reference task sequence. Customizations are done in many ways; some are script-based, some group policies, some are manual efforts, some are done in a tool known as Windows System Image Manager (WSIM), and others can be done with PowerShell scripts.

Checking out the customization documentation

The general caveats and principles of image customization are documented for Windows at this KB at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/973289 . The essential gist of this is that to customize the user profile of a future user of Windows 7 or 2008 R2, you must customize the default local user profile. When this is done, the settings in the default profile will become the settings of new user profiles on the system. Note that this is the only officially supported method of customizing the default user profile in Windows 7.

For Windows 8.x, things change somewhat. The steps are documented at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library...