Introduction

With LEA plans to update the AD we are starting to look at the deployment of Windows 7 Professional across the school - I'm quite excited about it but am aware that it isn't going to be an easy ride.

I am busy collecting and collating information, trying out tools, trying out methods and so on.

Current Information

Our current setup is a WDS server running on a Windows 2008 server. It deploys Windows XPSP3 and works really well with our pre-staged machine names. It's not a big image as the large majority of our software is deployed via GPO. Basically if it isn't GPO'able then I don't bother with it :-) I have made some custom GPOs and we purchased AdminStudio last year to do this.

The main application installed onto the image is Creative Suite 3 Master Edition. The installation issues with this are well documented across the internet. We could use a script but decided on putting it into the image.

At the moment the Windows XP image covers all of our machines. It is universal.

Project Plan

So my plan over Whistun is to move the school over to Windows 7 Pro and upgrade our Office installation to 2007 (although this maybe 2010). All of the GCSE and ALevel projects will have gone so there will be no worry about pupils getting confused during their coursework periods. The teachers are another matter..... :-)

Where I have Reached

To begin with I have worked with WDS. I created a reference WIndows 7 installation - didn't bother with any software whilst testing. I captured it and saved it back to the WDS server. This worked as I expected it to.

I updated the WDS boot.wim file so that it could cope with Windows 7 and managed to deploy the reference image. As expected it asked me for machine names and other setup information. I realise I need to create some sort of sysprep.inf file or whatever the newer version is called.

Then I started reading my Windows 7 Reference Manual. This tells me I should be deploying using MDT2010 (with WDS if I want). So I install it and follow the instructions to capture an image. Again this works and I now have an MDT2010 image of Windows 7 Pro. I've also imported the images from WDS (including the XP ones). I've deployed it using the Light TouchPE boot file.

Then came the end of the day and I went home.

Where I want to Go Next.

So where next? The next step is making this Windows 7 installation totally automated. I'm not quite sure how to do this so I am collecting information.

Do I go for the unattend.xml file that I can create with the Windows System Image Manager or do I go with WDS.

I've probably got the terminology wrong here and possibly the concepts. I know what I want to do and that is use MDT2010 as this is the recommended option.

So hopefully someone will hold my hand as I go through this.

The following now needs to be done:

• Deploy the image
  
• Automatically join the domain with the pre-staged machine name
  
• Bring the machine to the logon screen
  
• Several restarts to pick up various GPOs that will eventually be in place - such as various software installations.
  

Then I want to:

• Create and capture a user profile that can be used for the main school mandatory profile.
  
• Sort out the libraries and hide what needs to be hid.
  
• Tie down the OS
  

The End

Once I am happy with the test machines I will roll out to my classroom - 30 machines and test there.

Maybe I'll blog a bit more about this, but in the meantime thanks to Synack for helping me a bit today and pointing me to some websites.

If anyone else has advice, reference material etc I would love to read it.

GJE