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 (18 chapters)
Mastering the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

What USMT will migrate and won't migrate


There is a complete list of settings, restrictions, applications, and file types in the What does USMT migrate? section of the USMT User's Guide. I will highlight the most important capabilities and limitations.

USMT will migrate the following things:

  • Profile data for all local users as well as the all users profile including My Documents, My Pictures, Shared Documents, and Shared Favorites

  • EFS files and certificates (need to add /efs:copyraw option)

  • All file types defined in MigUser.xml (can be edited)

  • Application settings for certain apps defined in MigApps.xml (*) (can be edited)

  • Access control lists (ACL) with files and folders

  • Operating system data such as mouse and keyboard, taskbar, and also group membership and more

  • Computer settings

  • Local user to local user or local user to domain user

  • Domain user to a (new) domain user

USMT will NOT migrate the following things:

  • Applications themselves, though it will migrate application settings. (You need to install...