Technology
Apr 10, 2019
Best Practices for Workplace Modernization with Microsoft Deployment Toolkit

If you are trying to increase efficiency and reduce costs by automating your Windows 10 imaging process, the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) is a great alternative to more heavy-duty solutions like the Systems Center Configuration Manager (SCCM.) MDT is comparatively easy to set up and, more importantly, free. However, there is still a good deal of effort required to tailor your MDT setup to meet the needs of your organization. For maximum automation and minimum stress when it’s finally time to start imaging, you will have to make changes to the customsettings.ini and bootstrap.ini files in MDT, as well as the pre-boot execution environment (PXE) settings on your Windows Deployment Services (WDS) server. Microsoft provides an extensive guide to all of the customization options available, but this guide will take you through the basics and show you a few tricks.

The figure above shows all the wizard pages that will appear in a task sequence for a standard desktop OS installation, not including the steps required to connect to MDT. With the proper custom settings, you can pre-populate these fields or even skip the pages entirely. We’ll talk about each page that appears if you choose to include all of them, and why they should or shouldn’t be skipped. We will note when a change should be made to customsettings.ini versus bootstrap.ini.
‘Welcome’ Page
Since we are targeting employee workstations, there’s no reason you should need to configure a static IP address, which is the only other thing you can do on this page aside from setting a keyboard layout. If standard U.S. QWERTY works for you, then you can skip the welcome page by adding the line below to your bootstrap.ini file.
SkipBDDWelcome=YES
‘Credentials’ Page

Here you will be asked to input credentials for connecting to a deployment share. You won’t actually need to give the name of the deployment share, as that is included by default, but you will need to input the username, password, and domain of an account that has privileges to connect to it. You’ll want to make sure this account also has rights to join the computer to the domain later on in the task sequence. It’s worth noting that this account’s password will be stored in the clear on your MDT server, so please give the account minimal privileges and be cautious about who can log on to your MDT server. To skip this page, add the lines below to your bootstrap.ini file.
UserDomain=YOURDOMAIN UserID= UserPassword=
‘Select a Task Sequence’ Page
We recommend not skipping this page, as you will have multiple task sequences for different deployment scenarios. They might have different applications or even operating system versions. Unless you will always use the same task sequence, let the administrator decide which sequence to use at runtime.