Deployment

Windows 7 has improved desktop and application deployment. One of the toughest jobs in migrating to a different system is the deployment process. Microsoft has considered past issues and improved many aspects of this process for Windows 7, including hardware and application compatibility, new imaging tools and deployment methods/tools, and improved migration tools.

One of the biggest issues in Vista was driver and application compatibility support, and it has been addressed in Windows 7. As one will see when installing Windows 7, most third-party hardware and devices should work from first boot. If not, Microsoft has included multiple new ways to obtain and find solutions to hardware issues; the same is true for application support. New in Windows 7 is Dynamic Driver Provisioning. Drivers may be stored in a repository separate from the images that will be deployed. Then the drivers may be installed from this repository based on the system's hardware requirements. This feature lowers driver conflicts and speeds up installation and setup times of new machines, an administrator's dream.

Deployment tools and methods have also been improved to ease deployment headaches. The Deployment Image Servicing and Management (DISM) tool has been introduced to provide a centralized location to build and maintain Windows 7 image files. Multicast Multiple Stream Transfer allows for deploying these images from multiple locations, speeding up the deployment time. Windows Easy Transfer and the User State Migration Tool (USMT) have been improved to assist migrating user profiles, data, and settings from one system to another. Lastly, Windows 7 now supports VHD image management and deployment allowing for deployment of the same VHD image to a virtual or physical machine. This allows for standardization across all Windows 7 systems in your environment.