Overview

Article
08/27/2008

Microsoft® Deployment Solution Accelerator provides technology for deploying Windows® operating systems, the 2007 Microsoft Office system, and Microsoft Office 2003. Microsoft Deployment is the next version of Business Desktop Deployment (BDD) 2007. However, the larger focus of Microsoft Deployment is on methodology and best practices. By following the guidance in Microsoft Deployment, teams are putting into action proven best practices that Microsoft uses in its own development projects and that are based on the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF). Figure 1 shows the top-level organization of the Microsoft Deployment documentation, which describes these methodologies and best practices.

Figure 1. Microsoft Deployment documentation

Microsoft Deployment includes a great deal of documentation—more than 1,000 pages. Many IT pros try to plow through all of this documentation just to determine whether they want to use Microsoft Deployment in their deployment project. Although team members should thoroughly read all the documentation before using Microsoft Deployment in a production deployment, sometimes, they just want to evaluate or learn about it. This quick-start guide helps team members quickly evaluate Microsoft Deployment by providing condensed, step-by-step instructions for using Microsoft Deployment to install Windows operating systems.

Note In this document, Windows applies to the Windows Vista®, Windows XP Professional, Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, Windows Server® 2008, and Windows Server 2003 operating systems unless otherwise noted.

Team members use one of three processes to install an operating system:

Zero Touch Installation (ZTI) deployment for Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007. If the organization has an existing System Center Configuration Manager infrastructure, teams can use that infrastructure to capture the reference operating system image and efficiently deploy it to client computers. This process is described in the section, “Quick Start for ZTI Deployments with System Center Configuration Manager,” later in this guide.
ZTI deployment for Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS) 2003. If the organization has an existing Systems Management Server 2003 infrastructure, use ZTI deployment to capture the reference operating system image, and then deploy it using Systems Management Server 2003. This process is described in the section, “Quick Start for ZTI Deployments with Systems Management Server 2003,” later in this guide.
Lite Touch Installation (LTI) deployment. If the organization does not have a System Center Configuration Manager or Systems Management Server 2003 infrastructure, teams can use the LTI process to capture reference operating system images, and then deploy them across the network. This process is described in the section, “Quick Start for LTI Deployments,” in this guide.

Note Because of the increased complexity of using ZTI deployments with Systems Management Server 2003 or System Center Configuration Manager, only summary information is provided for ZTI deployments in this guide.

After using this guide to evaluate Microsoft Deployment, team members can delve into the rest of the guidance to learn more about the advanced features of Microsoft Deployment.

Overview

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