Preparing for Development

Whether your organization uses MDT 2010 or not, it will likely require multiple teams to develop high-volume deployment projects. Most teams need a lab environment. Although each team can construct a separate lab, most organizations create a single lab that shares facilities such as servers, networks, system backup, and source control with separate workspaces (computers and network shares) for each team. Within this environment, teams can work separately when necessary and jointly when appropriate. It also helps minimize the number of computers and servers required.

The Project Planning SMF is the best time to begin preparing the development environment, however. The process includes installing MDT 2010, stocking the lab environment with the files necessary to perform each team's job, locating application media, and so on. The following sections describe steps to complete during the Project Planning SMF to expedite the development process.

Application Management

Application management is the process of repackaging applications or automating their installation and configuration. Organizations can have hundreds or thousands of applications. Often, users install each application differently on each computer, leading to inconsistency across computers and resulting in support and management issues.

Repackaging or automating an application's installation has many benefits. Most obviously, it allows applications to install without user intervention, which is especially desirable when deploying applications as part of a disk image or during disk image deployment. In addition, repackaging or automating leads to consistency that lowers deployment and ownership costs by reducing support issues and enhancing management.

Before migrating from your current version of Windows to Windows 7, the project team must also test applications to ensure that they are compatible with Windows 7. You might have several thousand applications installed across distributed networks. Compatibility problems with one or many of these applications can disrupt productivity and damage the user experience and satisfaction with the project. Testing applications and solving compatibility problems saves time and money for the organization. It also prevents roadblocks to future deployment projects based on perceived pain.

Although most applications developed for earlier versions of Windows will probably perform well on Windows 7, some applications might behave differently because of new technologies in it. Test the following applications to ensure compatibility:

• Custom tools, such as logon scripts
• Core applications that are part of the standard desktop configurations, such as office productivity suites
• LOB applications, such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) suites
• Administrative tools, such as antivirus, compression, backup, and remote-control applications

The following list describes steps that you can take in the Project Planning SMF to begin building the lab environment for application packaging and compatibility testing:

• Installation media For each application you test, repackage, and automate, you must have a copy of the application's installation media, any configuration documentation, and product keys. If your IT department doesn't have the media or other information, check with the subject matter expert (SME) for each application.
• Destination computers Within the lab, the project team requires destination computers that resemble computers found in the production environment. Each destination computer should have Windows 7 installed on it to test applications' compatibility with the operating system and application installation.
• Application Compatibility Toolkit For more information on the Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT), we discuss in next tutorial.
• SQL Server Install Microsoft SQL Server in the lab environment. The ACT stores the application inventory using SQL Server, which is available on volume-licensed media.
• Host computer with network shares You must have a computer on which to host the application installations. Shares on this computer hold the original installation sources and completed packages. You can install the ACT and SQL Server on the host computer.
• Application packaging software The project team needs software with which to repackage applications. The application packaging software will be installed on each team member's development computer.
• Deployment mechanism The project team requires a mechanism for deploying ACT and application packages. This can be through logon scripts, a local Web site, or another deployment mechanism.