Chris and Daves SharePoint and Tech Blog

Adding an application to your MDT installation

The next thing we will do is add Office 2010 to the base image this is not a necessary step at the moment so if you deploy applications using a 3rd party tool you can skip this step. Open the Deployment workbench and the MDT Deployment Share section and right click on the applications sub section and choose “New Application”

This will launch the new application wizard this will give you three options

Application with source files

Application without source files or elsewhere on the network

Application Bundle

On the next screen fill in the Publisher details, Application name, Version and Language the only mandatory field is application name

The next screen asks you to choose the location of the source files I will be using the Office 2010 DVD for this article

The next screen will ask for the destination location in your MDT deployment I will leave this at the default setting.

The next screen asks for the command line to kick off the install you can use command line arguments in this but again I will leave it as default and customize later.

Next you will see a summary screen and when you click next all the source files will be copied to your deployment.

After the copy process click finish your application is now ready to deploy with your image.

Customizing your application

   From the deployment workbench click on application and right click on your newly created package and choose properties

From this screen we will see 4 tabs including an office products tab as illustrated below.

The part we are going to focus on is the “Office Customization Tool” button you can on the office tab enter the product key and enter basic information but we will look more closely at the advanced customization available.

Office Customization Tool

  When you click on the Office Customization Tool button an information box will pop up informing you that the MSP file created will need to be stored in the updates folder so that setup can find it during the office install.

Once Ok is click you will see the screen illustrated below

Highlight the product and click OK this will give you access to the advanced customization

This interface and options available would require a booklet of its own but you can find more information at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc179097.aspx  

  Once you have finished your customization close the tool and update the deployment share from the workbench this is always good practice after any changes.