Deployment

As we all know and hate, everything in Microsoft products and operating systems defaults to English United States and a time zone of -8hrs Pacific Time.

This week, I’ve been working with Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) for a customer to image client machines in their environment. In MDT, we want to use the Deployment Share Rules configuration to hide the wizard selection panes for setting the time zone, region and locale settings and automatically set them to the UK settings and as such, prompt the user for one less piece of information, making our Lite Touch Installation (LTI) as Zero Touch Installation (ZTI) as possible. The MDT documentation tells us that we need to use the SkipLocaleSelection and SkipTimeZone properties to hide the panels in the wizard but it doesn’t give us the values for overriding the default values.

Luckily for us, a helpful blog post from Andrew Barnes at http://scriptimus.wordpress.com/2011/04/16/mdt-2010-regional-settings/ gives us the values without us having to dig through the full code and value listings on MSDN. If you are in a country other than the UK, sorry, I don’t have those codes to had, but Andrew does provide the links to the MSDN pages which have the full listing of codes.

With those values and settings added to the Deployment Share Rules, our users invoking a LTI via the Boot Media or via PXE will have to answer a few less questions helping them to get the process moving faster and also means that we don’t have to worry about our mixed up ” and @ symbols on UK and US keyboards. It’s also very important for troubleshooting early on in MDT deployments as if we want to review a setup log on the client, we want to have our time codes in the correct time zone so that we can figure out when certain events are taking place.