Welcome to Desktop Deployment Essentials our new series to help you prepare for
your shift to Windows 10 and Office 365 ProPlus in the next few minutes I'll
walk through step 6 in our recommended deployment process wheel options for
deploying your operating system images and upgrades using your preferred tools
now whether you're planning for bare-metal deployment, PC refresh or
replacement, in-place upgrade or combination of these, we'll cover all of
your options. Now if you've been following the deployment process wheel
till now you've at least partially completed the steps for device and app
readiness, prepared your infrastructure, configured and collected app packages,
have a plan in place for migrating user files, and configuring default user
settings, as well as have plans for retaining your existing security
controls, and perhaps deploying some new ones. Now we've arrived at the stage
where you're putting all of these pieces together to automate as much as you can
to install Windows 10 in Office 365 ProPlus along with all the necessary
drivers, apps and whatever else is needed. Ultimately the best measure of success
is meeting user expectations and avoiding disruptions in their work and in this
step, you'll start testing and deploying the pilot users as part of your phased
deployment. Now one tip here before you broaden deployment, you'll need to skip
ahead to step 8 in our deployment process wheel and that's about user
communications and training. Most organizations use the process of PC
imaging to configure and capture a clone of Windows including a base set of
standard apps that are pre-installed or even a thinner image where you only put
in an application runtimes and updates. Now the best way to do this is by using
a virtual machine for this process to avoid any unexpected driver related
compatibility issues and for automation purposes now if you're going the image
capture out. We also recommend automating as much as possible to ensure the best
quality image and a repeatable process. Now for most deployments, it's best to
put as little customization and apps as possible into the windows image prior to
capturing. This is what we call a thin image approach which can save overall
bandwidth on the network by eliminating a number of apps that are attached to
the image and by starting with a thin base image, you can also layer in
required apps, languages, configurations and those can be dynamically-tailored to
users. Now during the build and capture process tools like System Center
Configuration Manager and the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit use the System
Preparation tool or sysprep along with the generalized command
reseal your image before they capture the Windows 10 installation as an image.
The captured image will have the windows image or wim file format like standard
Windows installation media now once you have your custom wim file you can also
use another task sequence as part of an OS deployment in System Center
Configuration Manager or Microsoft Deployment Toolkit to perform deployment
related tasks to apply the image and we run tasks both before and after the
Windows images applied. Now with your custom image ready, the installation or
migration type will fall into the following categories: first bare-metal
deployment now. This is the scenario used to deploy an image to a clean disc or
where you reimage a computer and where you don't intend to keep any of the data on
the disk. Second and similar to bare metal is computer refresh the key
difference here is that user state either remains on the disk or will be
restored after the installation is complete. And last is computer (PC)
replacement. Here as the name implies you're replacing a PC with another PC in
this case there's off from a backup of user files from the first PC to a
central location, then a restore of those files back to a second PC. Now all of
these scenarios have something in common they use a task sequence to run and a
custom image can be applied each time. Now let's talk about a brand new option
available for the first time as a ConfigMgr tasks sequence with Windows 10
in-place upgrade. In-place upgrade from a previous version of Windows does not
require a task sequence to execute, though it is recommended that you use
one. Now in-place upgrade does not allow you to apply a custom image with
applications pre-installed, but you can update the default install.wim using
offline servicing for example. You might want to make sure it has the latest
Windows Update supplied prior to performing upgrades. In-place upgrade
uses Windows setup. The setup engine runs several small pre-installation
checks looking for known compatibility issues, it also preserves the user state
and applications, and only removes what isn't compatible with the version of
Windows that's being installed. With this option previously installed applications
and user state are preserved. The in-place upgrade scenario can be used to
migrate to Windows 10 from legacy versions of Windows as well as upgrade
from older versions of Windows 10. Now one more thing after Windows setup
completes the upgrade your task sequence can continue to run in upgrade
applications like Office. Now let's talk about phase deployment. As you're
planning your deployment, you'll be targeting computers for bare metal
refresh, replace, and upgrade paths the recommended approach here in this case
is to use phased rollouts to collections of similar machines. This way you can
validate compatibility, delivery automation, user acceptance, network
bandwidth consumption and other factors before increasing the scale of your
deployment. Now regardless of the deployment type you choose, you'll want
to make sure it's as automated as possible for predictability and
reliability. Microsoft offers two solutions to automate OS deployment
using automated task sequences System Center Configuration Manager provides
built-in operating system deployment capabilities to complement its
capabilities for software distribution and software update management. Now
ConfigMgr is widely used by organizations of all sizes and supports
all four Windows deployment types. Optionally you can integrate ConfigMgr
with Microsoft Intune to add additional capabilities for deployment
and device management. And one other deployment option is the free Microsoft
Deployment Toolkit - or MDT - which is typically used by small and medium sized
organizations for OS deployment. This requires very little infrastructure. MDT
integrates with Windows Deployment Services or WDS for network boot and it
supports all for deployment types as well and can install applications,
drivers, and settings and of course, MDT can even be integrated with ConfigMgr
now our last option new with Windows 10 is to configure new PCs as
part of your hardware refresh cycle using Windows Autopilot. Here you can
work with supporting hardware vendors to customize the default Windows setup
experience for example by eliminating options presented to users like
licensing agreements or telemetry settings then when a user signs into the
PC during setup using their Azure AD credentials, the device and roles into
Microsoft Intune which can then take over the deployment process and apply
applications, software updates and configurations and compliance policies.
Windows Autopilot can also optionally prevent the user from accessing the
first session until provisioning is complete. So that was a run-through of
your OS deployment scenarios and how you can use your tools to automate the
process at scale. The task sequencing engines that you use also apply as you
roll out Windows 10 and optionally the Office 365 ProPlus
Semi Annual Updates we saw how Windows Autopilot can modernize provisioning of
new PCs coming directly from hardware suppliers. Next up on the deployment
process wheel, we will explain your options for keeping
current with updates in the new Windows and Office as a Service model and to
learn more visit our Modern Desktop Deployment center and keep following our
Desktop Deployment Essentials series here on Microsoft Mechanics. Thanks for watching!