Released – MDT 2012 Beta 1

The MDT team has been busy working on MDT 2012 and have announced the release of Beta 1 today.

Ok so what new things are you going to see when you install MDT 2012? Well you won’t see a lot really.

This beta is really about the “under-the-hood” stuff, those continuous improvements that that make MDT a great solution. So what do we get then?

1. The biggest part of the update is support for Configuration Manager 2012
2. The wizards have been updated and are now “prettier”
3. Bugs from MDT 2010 Update 1 have been addressed

Of course there are more updates than this but these are my highlights.

Let’s go through this in a little more depth.

ConfigMgr 2012 Support – MDT 2012 beta 1 provides support for ConfigMgr 2012. You will not see any obvious changes vs. how this works with ConfigMgr 2010. So if you feel comfortable with using MDT with ConfigMgr 2007 then you will be fine with ConfigMgr 2012.

So how about the wizards. They definitely are “prettier” and more informative. Has you can see from the following screenshot the wizard is structured so that users can better understand where they are in the deployment process.

There are also some other smaller changes that I think are cool. As an example with MDT 2010 when you are creating an image it is very easy to see how the image creation process is progressing. However once you get to the task where the image is captured it looks like the task is frozen, you have no idea how long the capture process will take. Well now the MDT team have added a progress bar, so now I know how long my coffee break can be.  You can see it is the small things that keep me happy .

These are just a couple of highlights of Beat. MDT 2012 Beta 1 is looking great and there will be more features in future betas. I am getting excited already!

So download MDT 2012 from Connect. Test it in your labs with ConfigMgr 2007 and 2012, then get on the forums and give your feedback.

This post was contributed by Ben Hunter, an Architect with Microsoft Services

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Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Ben, I've had a custom solution for a real progress bar since 2010 was released, but this only worked when ImageX was being used: capture or apply.  With Windows 7, the Setup program is used to apply a custom WIM, thus the method of updating progress by reading in data from the imagex log didn't apply.  Does MDT 2012 now have a real progress for an Win7 image apply which uses SETUP rather than Imagex ?  I once looked into this, but was never able to find a setup log which consistently provided a status (in the panther dirs); nor have i stumbled onto a methodclass which could provide this info.  

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Thanks for the catch on ConfigMgr 2010 everyone. That was a secret product that I shouldn't have mentioned. Or maybe it was a typo, I get confused with all of our year related product names.

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Hi Andrea, I am not sure that there is a good walkthrough available. You are correct about how "deployment shares" have changed. I would suggest that you use DFS-R to replicate your Deployment Shares between locations.  You can then deployment images directly from the Atlanta location. Thanks, Ben

• Anonymous
  June 01, 2011
  What is "ConfigMgr 2010"?  Is that an MS internal name for "ConfigMgr 2007 SP2 R3"?

• Anonymous
  June 02, 2011
  Great to see Ben blogging again - it's been a while! Thanks for the information

• Anonymous
  June 02, 2011
  When did ConfigMgr 2010 got released ?

• Anonymous
  June 03, 2011
  I didn't know we had ConfigMgr 2010 :)

• Anonymous
  June 07, 2011
  MDT could definitely use a better user interface, and I don't mean pretty graphics. For example, why do we have to copy/paste GUIDs to customsettings.ini in order to make an application mandatory, or edit .ini files to define which pages of the wizard should be skipped? There should be a UI for such basic/essential tasks, instead of being forced to edit .ini and .xml files. I fear that many administrators don't bother to learn how to use MDT because it's so ... user unfriendly. The concept behind MDT seems pretty good, but it's got many rough edges. I guess we should be satisfied that we don't have to open an .xml file to look up the application GUIDs as of MDT 2010 Update 1 ;-) Looking forward to the new version ...

• Anonymous
  June 21, 2011
  This is cool, but my team has already done this with MDT 2010 by using the image x logs to give us a progress bar.  MS is late again.   I still love MDT best free product on the market for deployments.

• Anonymous
  August 18, 2011
  Ben- Back to it again-it's been a long time-In  MDT 2012 deployment points have changed form my old 2008 where I had a lab and a network deployment point....is that now handled with the profiles and linked deployment shares in a similar manner? Any good doc out there for me as a walkthrough?Another question is we have another location (CT VS GA) two domains, currently - will chnage) is ther esomeway I can deploy my images to Atlanta from this domain by replication??? Thanks

• Anonymous
  September 19, 2011
  Tyhere appears to be a "bug", we get an 0x80090005 error at the end of any deployment,  has anybody else seemn this with 2012???

• Anonymous
  September 26, 2011
  The error  0x80090005 is caused by the USMT trying to kick in even when disabled in custumsettings.ini. if you disable it in tasks its OK