Deployment 4 – Who stole my build?
Well for those of you that have already installed Deployment 4 may have notice that Deployment 4 does not use builds anymore. Task sequences are used instead.
Task sequences are very similar to builds with a few subtle changes.
All of the task sequence configuration information is now maintained within the task sequence itself, NOT in the general and settings tabs settings tab.
So let’s compare builds and task sequences. The screen shots below are from a BDD 2007 build.
So where exactly is this information stored in Deployment 4?
The information is stored with the task that uses it. So for example let’s have a look at the operating system deployment task. As you can see from the screen shot below there is a drop down box that allows you to choose an operating system.
Now let’s look at the disk partitioning task. As you can see below this task allows you to specify the disk configuration in the task itself... NICE ... no more mucking around with diskpart files!!
I really like this new approach to to configuring settings. I think it will prove to be much more flexible than the way builds are configured.
Unfortunately there is not currently an interface to configure the following operating system configuration settings:
- Admin password
- Product key
- Full name
- Organization
- IE home page
- Unattend/Sysprep file editing
Don’t panic! The Deployment 4 team is working on adding this functionality to the operating system deployment task before it is released. For now you will have to manually update the configuration files. As a teaser I have included a screen shot from an SCCM task sequence to show you the “apply windows settings” task, as this is what the final solution might look like.
For more information about task sequences please have a look at this post by Michael Niehaus.
