Best Practices For OS Update Via SCCM

SCCM is a great tool to upgrade your operating system for the whole department. Microsoft provides lots of documentation to help. However, the amount of documentation is so huge that it becomes difficult what should or what shouldn't be done. To make it easy on the new IT guy, lets take a very simple but very common example.

Suppose, Windows 7 is to be installed on new hardware or reused hardware via SCCM asset management. The complete hard disk is wiped clean and the new system is installed. We are not including data migration in this example, to keep things simple. We are assuming that all data has been back up somewhere on the network or external drives which are available.

When performing this job, you need to take care of a few things.

• Standardisation: create as few profiles as you can. It will save time and effort during the actual OS roll-out. It will also reduce the support burden on the IT team because most of the machines would be identical and even a mass repair would be possible.
• Group policies: Whatever you can configure using group policy, please do those. It is easier to manage and support computers when they are under common groups.
• Hardware: Ensure that all the hardware are recent and working. 2GB RAM would be the basic minimum. Try to avoid different models of hardware and try to use hardware from major manufacturers because they have better driver support and documentation.
• Base image: you should create a base image using a VMWare virtual machine or on a basic set up. This should only contain the OS, the updates and the patches and may be some customisations for the organisation.
• User state migration: USMT might be a great tool for migrating the user data to a new machine but it also has a nagging bug. Thankfully, there is a hotfix available for it, on Windows XP, Vista and 7. the hotfix must be on the server and on all the computers during the installation. Moreover, USMT is created using XML files which needs good knowledge of XML. You need to test it multiple times after readying it to really trust it for complete and safe data transfer. If there is a way around it, please take that route.

For more detailed approach, go to Microsoft’s website and download the tutorials, documentations and how-to videos which are available for free.

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