Videos: Upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7 using MDT 2010

If you’re thinking about how best to upgrade machines within your environment from Windows XP to Windows 7, you’d be hard pressed to find a better solution than the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010.  MDT 2010 allows you to deploy Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 and is the recommended process and toolset for automating desktop and server deployment. MDT provides you with the following benefits:

• Unified tools and processes required for desktop and server deployment in a common deployment console and collection of guidance.
• Reduced deployment time and standardized desktop and server images, along with improved security and ongoing configuration management.
• Fully automated Zero Touch Installation deployments by leveraging System Center Configuration Manager 2007 Service Pack 2 Release Candidate and Windows deployment tools. For those without a System Center Configuration Manager 2007 infrastructure, MDT leverages Windows deployment tools for Lite Touch Installation deployments.

• Access deployment shares from anywhere on the network and replicate files and settings across organizational boundaries or sites.
• Organize and manage drivers, operating systems, applications, packages, and task sequences with an improved UI.
• Automate UI functionality using the Windows PowerShell command line interface.

Now, before you go diving in there head-first to play with it, I’d take a look at these 2 short videos.  These are the first 2 parts, of what I presume, will be a longer series, but these are certainly enough to get you going with MDT 2010.

Part 1: Building the Deployment Environment: Learn how to build media that will automatically migrate computers from Windows XP to Windows 7 with user data, custom applications and drivers. This demonstration will walk you through the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) Deployment Workbench and how it works.

Part 2: Initiating the Install and Migrating the PC: Explore the user experience for migrating the Windows XP computer to Windows 7 and how brief - or "lite touch" - interaction is required up front to automate the entire process of data migration, OS installation, driver and application customization, and domain join.

Pretty useful if you want to get a heads up on MDT 2010!