Windows 8 deployment – Part 2: Importing Windows 8

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Joseph Moody

Joseph Moody is a network admin for a public school system and helps manage 5,500 PCs. He is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) in Cloud and Datacenter Management and blogs at DeployHappiness.com.

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In our first post, we installed and configured the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) Deployment Share. But what is a Deployment Share without anything in it?

An empty Deployment Share

In this part, we will import Windows 8 as our Operating System and add Office 2010 as our application. We will also import drivers for a Dell OptiPlex 390 as well as Dell Latitude E5520.

Operating Systems

In this series, we will be using the default Windows 8 image (install.wim file). While you can certainly build and capture an image to use in MDT, I would recommend against this. By using the default image, you automatically eliminate issues related to the image. As a bonus, you do not even have to Sysprep the Windows 8 media! Finally, the granular nature of MDT allows you to layer portions of a traditional image into separate steps. This will greatly help you when troubleshooting. We will be looking at these steps soon.

So how do we import an Operating System? Right click on Operating Systems and select Import Operating System.

The OS Importing Wizard within MDT

Select “Full set of source files” and press next. Select the source directory (either a CD/DVD drive or an extracted/mounted ISO). Continue through the wizard.

Our imported operating system

Applications

So now that we have our Operating System imported, let’s get Office imported! To import an application, right click on the Application node and select New Application.

The new application wizard

The first thing that you’ll notice is that the New Application wizard and Operating System wizard are very similar. In fact, the behind the scenes importing process is nearly identical. The only big difference will be the command details and the advance options.

To import Office, we will select Application with Source Files and select next. Under the Details window, be as specific as possible. This will allow you to easily group applications later and can help you customize your deployment in an extremely targeted manner.

If you will be importing multiple versions of Office, you will want to specify that in this window.

Specify your source and destination folder name. Because we were specific in the details window, we can accept the default destination folder name. On the Command Details window, simply enter setup.exe as the command.

Later, we will add additional commands to this installation.

Continue through the wizard. After selecting Finish, you should see the Office 2010 application listed.

Now we are getting somewhere!

Customizing the Application

Chances are that you will want to customize the Office installation. For example, you may want to have the install run quietly, automatically activate, or simply remove certain portions of Office.

To do this, right click on Microsoft Office 2010 and select Properties. Then select the Office Products tab.

Customizing the application

Instead of letting Office decide on our options, we will manually specify them. To do this, select the down arrow next to Let Office Setup decide. In our environment, we used Pro Plus. We then specified other options such as a Product Key, EULA acceptance, and a few other items.

As a note, these options are directly written to the Config.xml file. If you need to add advance options, you can select Edit Config.xml

If you wish to customize Office further (for example, setting certain components to install on First Use), you can do so by setting the Office Customization Tool button. If you do this, be sure to save your MSP file in the \Applications\Microsoft Office 2010\Updates\ folder. For this series, our deployment share is found at C:\DeploymentShare\Applications\Microsoft Office 2010\Updates\.

To save Windows Update time, you may also want to download Service Pack 1 for Microsoft Office 2010. You will then extract the update files into C:\DeploymentShare\Applications\Microsoft Office 2010\Updates\.

Additional advanced instructions can be found here.

Drivers

In this series, we are going to import drivers for two models (a desktop and a laptop). To keep our drivers organized, right click on Out-of-Box Drivers and select New Folder.

Import drivers

We will name our folder Windows 8.

If you will be deploying Windows 8 x64 and x86, you may want to create separate folders.

To make driver model management easier, we will create a folder for each model. To make sure our folder names match the exact model name, we type “wmic computersystem get model” at a command prompt.

wmic computersystem get model

Our Out-of-Box Drivers folder will now look like this.

By organizing your drivers, you will save a lot of time later!

To download our drivers, we will head over to Dell’s Enterprise Deployment site and download the .CAB files for our two models. We will create a folder for each .CAB file to save them in.

After our .CAB files have downloaded, we easily import them by right clicking on each sub folder (ex: Optiplex 390) and browsing to the corresponding folder where the .CAB file is saved.

The folder above contains the OptiPlex 390 CAB file.

A few minutes later, our driver folder is populated!

Populated drivers

For detailed enterprise wide best practices, see this article.

Conclusion

This wraps up part 2 of our Deploying Windows 8 series. So far, we have set up MDT, imported Windows 8, configured Office 2010, and arranged our drivers. In our next post, we will bring all of this together to create a Task Sequence!