Deploying Applications

Deploying applications is an important aspect of desktop deployment. Choosing the applications you want to deploy, and deciding how to deploy them, affects the choices that you make when deploying the operating system. For example, will you include applications in the operating system image or deploy them later? Including applications in the operating system image provides good performance but low flexibility; deploying them later provides poorer performance but higher flexibility and lower maintenance costs.

During the planning stages of your deployment project, you must identify each application used in the environment. Then you must prioritize the application inventory so that you can focus on the most important applications first and possibly eliminate applications that are duplicates, no longer in use, or unsupported by the Windows 7 operating system.

After creating a prioritized application inventory, you must find and mitigate compatibility issues. Then you determine how to deploy the applications. This tutorial helps you make these decisions and use the tools that Microsoft provides for deploying applications, including Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010 (MDT 2010).