Released – MDT 2012 Beta 1

The MDT team has been busy working on MDT 2012 and have announced the release of Beta 1 today.

Ok so what new things are you going to see when you install MDT 2012? Well you won’t see a lot really.

This beta is really about the “under-the-hood” stuff, those continuous improvements that that make MDT a great solution. So what do we get then?

  1. The biggest part of the update is support for Configuration Manager 2012
  2. The wizards have been updated and are now “prettier”
  3. Bugs from MDT 2010 Update 1 have been addressed

Of course there are more updates than this but these are my highlights.

Let’s go through this in a little more depth.

ConfigMgr 2012 Support – MDT 2012 beta 1 provides support for ConfigMgr 2012. You will not see any obvious changes vs. how this works with ConfigMgr 2010. So if you feel comfortable with using MDT with ConfigMgr 2007 then you will be fine with ConfigMgr 2012.

So how about the wizards. They definitely are “prettier” and more informative. Has you can see from the following screenshot the wizard is structured so that users can better understand where they are in the deployment process.

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There are also some other smaller changes that I think are cool. As an example with MDT 2010 when you are creating an image it is very easy to see how the image creation process is progressing. However once you get to the task where the image is captured it looks like the task is frozen, you have no idea how long the capture process will take. Well now the MDT team have added a progress bar, so now I know how long my coffee break can be.  You can see it is the small things that keep me happy Smile.

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These are just a couple of highlights of Beat. MDT 2012 Beta 1 is looking great and there will be more features in future betas. I am getting excited already!

So download MDT 2012 from Connect. Test it in your labs with ConfigMgr 2007 and 2012, then get on the forums and give your feedback.

This post was contributed by Ben Hunter, an Architect with Microsoft Services

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