I’d just like to hear how everyone on here is doing their image/s in terms of pushing them out in your environment to different machines?
In my environment, I’ve got a mixture between HP laptops, Surface and even some desktops. Now we typically focus on the same model although we have everyone on a 3 year rolling upgrade where we try to do a 1/3 of the business every year which means we get the latest of ‘that’ model every year (so Surface 4/5/6 in the recent 3 years).
I’ve then also got some users that require programs x (finance) and others that require program y with the rest just having a ‘generic’ image.
What I find myself doing is setting up say a surface 4 ‘general’ image which I push out for most of the staff then adding my finance programs ontop and creating another image for finance. I do the same for the HP models where I have a 2017 version, 2018 version etc.
All in all, this works fairly well for me but when I image something later on in the year, I obviously have to run updates and add any extra changes that have happened during the year that I now require. It also means when I get a new model of a laptop, I’m having to install everything from scratch to get it ready.
Again, this isn’t really an issue for me but I’ve been asking myself the question of is this the best way to be doing this? Should I somehow be having a machine in a VM environment where I can apply these updates and take a image of that? What do I do about the additional programs? Just have a few images based on those? Surely there are driver issues with a ‘universal image’ when going between surfaces and different models of laptops etc?
I’ve seen a little on sysprep mentioned but mostly for Windows 7. Never done it before so I’m not sure if this is the ‘common’ practice or if there is another way most approach this? My method works, just questioning if there’s a better way I should be approaching for this? Especially as I wait for a new model to arrive, I can’t really prepare anything until the device arrives so I can do my above method.