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Documenting Your Task Sequences Automagically

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Often times, after creating an MDT or SCCM task sequence, you need to document it for yourself or your customers. Usually, this involves creating a table with the groups and steps, extracting their descriptions, identifying conditions and denoting the step actions and variables and then having format it all nicely and with indents denoting hierarchy. All of this information is usually already in the XML of the task sequence and all you're really doing is formatting. You can automatically format XML documents by using an XSL transform with the right logic. In order to do this:

1. Copy the attached file at the bottom of the post to the same folder as your task sequence.

2. Open your task sequence in your favourite text editor.

3. After the first line which should look something like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?> or <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

enter the following as the second line:

<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="tsDocumentorv1.xsl"?>

4. Save your task sequence file and open it in Internet Explorer. Presto! The XSL takes care of formatting, indents and sizing.

Your Task Sequence should look like this:

image

You can even change the styles of groups and steps easily.

1. Open up the tsDocumentorv1.xsl file

2. Edit the following section:

<STYLE TYPE="text/css">
  TD.group { background-color:teal;color:white }
  TD.step { background-color:beige }
</STYLE>

Change the colours or any other css properties you choose!

The XSL should work with task sequences created with BDD 2007, MDT 2008 and SCCM 2007.

Please try it out and post comments.

This post was contributed by Aly Shivji a consultant with Microsoft Services - U.S. East Region. Credit to Michael Murgolo for initial idea and effort.

tsDocumentorv1.xsl

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    is there any possibility to printout a 2012 task sequence ?

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Jonathan, Thanks for the feedback. It looks like you are right, if there is a task that is outside of any group it won't be documented. I'll fix that in v1.1

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Thanks Jonathan for the feedback. An updated version (v2) has been posted in a separate post with this and other bug fixes Please try it out and feel free to comment.

  • Anonymous
    August 17, 2008
    Hi, I have a question regarding the resolution of Win PE during deployment. I want to be set to 800x600, default is 1024x768. In my templates under program files all .xml files are set to 800x600 and the first PE screen again comes to 1024. I'm lost on this one. Thank you.

  • Anonymous
    August 19, 2008
    Great job!!! Works fine for me :) Much faster to document then typing it manually... Only note : I have a task sequence that runs USMT capture state with SCCM that didn't had a group. I had to add a group so it could display all the information. Otherwise, it was empty.

  • Anonymous
    August 20, 2008
    It works great!!

  • Anonymous
    September 08, 2008
    Thanks for the great tip - exactly what I've been looking for. One question - when you mention "Copy the attached file at the bottom of the post to the same folder as your task sequence."  Where is this folder located?

  • Anonymous
    September 18, 2008
    You will have to right click on the task sequence to export it to a file. Put the file in the same folder as this file and follow the instructions and you should have a documented task sequence.

  • Anonymous
    February 17, 2009
    Hi! Thanks again for that tool.. I found out another thing that could be upgraded in future version... If you have multiple condition for a task to run, it will only display the first one. If by any chance that could be a minor modification and I could use it quickly, that would really help document my gigantic task sequence (lol)... thanks!! Jonathan

  • Anonymous
    March 25, 2010
    I exported a task sequence created with MDT 2008. Unfortunately the formating chnge not work for me.  All I got was continuos text file. Dont know if the MDT TS is different to export and document it using XSL formating.  

  • Anonymous
    March 25, 2010
    I just need to mentioned that I got the formating to work properly using your recommended post.  I had save the file with a wrong name.  That fixed my problem. Thanks so much for such a great and simple way to document Task Sequences.

  • Anonymous
    January 27, 2011

  1. Copy the attached file at the bottom of the post to the same folder as your task sequence. Where am i to do this?? I have been looking for days for this answer...

  • Anonymous
    July 18, 2011
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    December 02, 2011
    For anyone who hasn't found the link to the updated tsDocumentorv2.xsl script, it's here blogs.technet.com/.../update-to-the-tasksequence-documentor.aspx

  • Anonymous
    February 27, 2014
    I can't get this to work for 2012 (despite that fact that there is a procedure which apparently works).