Extending User-Driven Installation (UDI) in MDT 2012
A key pillar in our rebuilt User-driven installation for MDT 2012 was to remove the monolithic approach and focus on building an extensible, lego-set approach to our UDI Wizard & Designer. This is an important feature that allows developers, and some IT professionals with coding abilities, to effectively create new pages to meet the dynamic environments each of you live in every day.
For MDT 2012 UDI, we have several personas who can uniquely contribute to the success of deploying Windows in their environment. UDI is a user-centric approach to deploying Windows and enables the user to take control of their device running Windows.
The UDI Wizard provides a easy-to-use method for end-users to make common decisions for how Windows is deployed on their corporate device. This includes selecting applications, choosing a language pack, entering their unique machine name, and many more settings.
However, the UDI Wizard is broken down into a set of pages that execute in a stage group, as well as a stage. This allows IT professionals to really make key decisions on what they want, don’t want, and customize based on the type of deployment your end-user is doing.
In many cases, the pages used to deploy Windows at places such as Microsoft are too complex or not relevant and this drives IT professionals to seek ways to effectively solve these dynamic challenges. This is where corporate developers can use Microsoft’s Visual Studio tools to develop pages using UDI’s Software Development Kit (SDK). This provides maximum flexibility for corporations to ensure that they have the right deployment for the right user each time.
Lastly, the key to bringing this all together is the IT professional who often is the deployment engineer and also has knowledge of Configuration Manager’s OSD feature which UDI is built on top of. The deployment admin hears from end-users, has a unique understanding of corporate environment, and helps bring together the solution. This is super important for us at Microsoft is to offer the maximum flexibility – if you use what we provide in-box then we are golden. If not, we offer you the ability to customize to meet your needs.
A lot of folks are looking for documentation and help in getting up to speed with how they can utilize MDT 2012 UDI. To facilitate and help customers get up-to-speed, we’ve spent a lot of effort to help educate deployment engineers, and now developers, on how to take advantage of UDI.
Learn from the Software Development Engineer who architected the extensible UDI Wizard on how to extend and build your own pages as well as how to build extensions for our UDI Designer.
Enjoy!
Thanks,
-Chris
Comments
- Anonymous
January 01, 2003
thanks man!