MMS2009 Reporting: Managing drivers with MS Technologies

I attended the session by Michael Nieuhaus on how to manage drivers with WDS, MDT2010 and Config Manager 2007. Unfortunately i missed the first part on WDS but here's what i heard about MDT2010 and ConfigMgr 2007...

With Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010, it supports the following:

• Inject drivers 'just in time' for WinXP and above except for mass storage
• Now you can specify auto apply or apply all drivers to a specific group
• Drag and drop is available
• Integration with WSUS is available
• Potentially can be used with inventory tools like MAP and ACT (App Compat) to assist in assessment

The Demo that was showed was importing the drivers with MDT2010. Here's what i noticed about the demo:

• When he imported the driver it detected that the driver exists, it won't copy it again but rather populate the group with the same drivers.
• MDT didn't detect automatically the platform of the driver for the machine so you'll have to de-select if the appropriate drivers
• MDT can read CAB files directly. It will automatically extract it and read the INFs
  

Michael then proceeded to talk about driver management with Config Mgr 2007.When import a driver into SCCM, it doesn't import into the DB. It creates a DB entry to point to the driver stored in the specified location.

'Driver packages' in Config Mgr are then created for distribution to Distribution Points or "Forced" driver installation

Here are some of the supported features for drivers in Config Mgr:

• Just in time driver injections are supported
• Auto Apply drivers
• Drivers matched by PnP ID and can be filtered by categories
• Apply diver package
• All drivers are injected
• Categories can't be used
• Only choice for XP/2003 mass storage drivers
• Can be used with Task Sequence

Some Complications can arise with Config Mgr though..

• It will not import duplicates. To do this, you would either need to modify the folder contents everytime you need to import, or create a customized import process using the SDK
• Chipset drivers requires extra handling because the INFs include some redirection to other in-box INFs which makes them really challenging to inject. For this, you may want to consider including them into the image