Getting Back from MMS

For those of you who do not know me I was the feature PM of the product formally known as Modena. I am recently getting back from MMS where I helped my boss, Chris Adams, with his demo during the MDT 2010 Update 1 + ConfigMgr 2007 OSD: Even More "Better Together" session, and have decided to start my own blog. Yes, I know "more better" isn't exactly the best English, but I didn't come up with the title. This session talked to the new enhancements that would be available with 2010 update 1 and demonstrated the features that will be available with the release.

During this session it was announced that Modena is now being called UDI and would be included in MDT 2010 Update 1 due to be released soon. The OSD Setup Wizard, Designer, and OSD Results will all be included in the release and were demonstrated as part of the session. I would like to set the record straight for anyone who did see this session. I did not tell Chris to use a remote desktop connection to his machine and then demo turning off the network card of his VMJ. I thought he would be directly connected to his VM.

As part of the integration a lot of changes were made to the Modena task sequence in order to make it similar to the MDT task sequence templates. Additionally several of the Modena scripts were either merged into MDT by enhancing an existing MDT script or were excluded altogether as an existing MDT script already contained the needed functionality.

As to the coded features available with UDI, the majority of the enhancements were done to the designer. The timeline of the previous release of the designer did not allow for much of the validation functionality we would have liked to include. Because of this the majority of this work includes better error handling and validation checking with the designer. Just one example is that in the previous version of the designer it allowed adding in as many of the same image indexes as you wanted. So you could add image index “1” a hundred times, but your image would only include one image index “1”. If this scenario occurs in the next release of the designer it will give you a popup informing you that the index is already in use. This is just one of many validation enhancements that have been made to the designer.

As UDI is further integrated and released I look forward to blogging about it, its features and enhancements in the future.