Organizing applications and drivers in MDT 2010

In my previous post, I have suggested that applications and drivers should be organized in folders. Now, I will explain where this advice comes from and let you decide on everything else.

Selection Profiles
First we need to examine the way Selection Profiles work.
By the way they are located in Deployment Share-->Advanced Configuration-->Selection Profiles.

Selection profiles provide a convenient way of reducing the number of available applications, Operating Systems, drivers, packages and tasks. In a case of LTI, OS and Task Sequence part of profiles are useless. We will concentrate on Applications and Out-of-Box Drivers.

In both cases you will note that when you create a custom selection profile, you cannot select an individual driver or application: only folders can be selected. Thus, we need to organize our objects in folders if we want to control their selection.

Why we need Selection Profiles in LTI
When you are like me and you have quite a few different hardware configurations to manage, you will notice that the amount of Out-of-Box Drivers you will have will become large. Like me you will soon learn that some of your deployments crash with a blue screen or freeze or … All this due to incompatibility between some drivers you are injecting. This, for sure, happens because some of the injected drivers are not for the given hardware but are still used there for some “unknown” reason.

This problem can be solved by using profiles. Create a profile that will contain a folder with drivers only for a given hardware setup. Then, in the task sequence, inside the first step of Inject Drivers select the appropriate profile for your drivers.

Another situation has to do with application selection. If you decide to select applications during the deployment manually you will for sure appreciate a good folder structure. As a pure speculation: I think there is a possibility to select a folder with apps inside customsettings.ini based on a Task Sequence. I will modify my post when I have more news.

Useful links

• http://blogs.technet.com/b/mniehaus/archive/2009/07/12/mdt-2010-new-feature-18-selection-profiles.aspx
• http://www.minasi.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=32319
• http://blogs.technet.com/b/mniehaus/archive/2009/09/09/mdt-2010-new-feature-19-improved-driver-management.aspx

To come:

• revise and correct this post
• sustainable app deployment
  
• task sequences
  
• customsettings.ini and automation process for LTI
  
• deploying to an iMac with dual boot