The Information Technology department I am a member of is currently completing a domain migration project. One portion of my responsibility for this project was to create a Windows 7 Enterprise x64 image that included a number of applications such as Microsoft Office 2010 Plus, Adobe Acrobat X Pro and numerous others.

The solution used for making the images was Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2010. The deployment workbench is easily added as a Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in to an administrative workstation. Using MDT you may create task sequences and roles to customize your Windows 7 deployment to meet your organizations needs. Additionally, you may deploy your image(s) by specifying a particular computer(s), make and model or subnetwork. For instance, if you have a specific group of users on a particular subnetwork you may create an image for that group of users and deploy it very specifically to all computers on that subnetwork using the default gateway. This is just one of the many ways that you may customize your deploying using MDT.

In all, I highly recommend this platform for any Windows XP/7 large scale deployment needs that you may have.

For more information on MDT 2010 and the release of MDT 2012 please use the link below.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/solutionaccelerators/dd407791

Enjoy!

By default, Windows Server 2008 is configured to block all incoming Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) echo requests. You can enable the echo requests by making a configuration change to the Windows firewall using the following two methods.

1. Open the command prompt and type the following command “netsh firewall set icmpsetting 8”.
2. Open the Windows Firewall with Advanced Security. Navigate to the inbound rules and enable “File and Printer Sharing (Echo Request – ICMPv4-In)”.