Now that you have had a few weeks to test out the public Windows 7 beta, it’s time to think about how you’re going to deploy the goodness out to all your users. Fortunately the fine people at the Microsoft’s Solutions Accelerator group are on the ball. Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010 is already in beta. This edition of MDT will provide support for Windows 7 as well as Windows Server 2008 R2.

Some enhancements in MDT are:

Support for USMT 4.0. USMT or User State Migration Tools is like an extremely powerful user data migration tool. You can capture information from the hard drive, the registry, and other Windows data unique to specific users. Once the data has been captured a new OS can be deployed and then data can be restored. New in 4.0 is the ability to pull user data from offline media. This means that if something was lost, or the USMT state capture definitions change we can rerun the USMT capture against a backup image or even a Windows.old directory. A little known fact about the Vista/Win7 upgrade process is that the User state is first captured and then a clean installation of Windows is imaged to the computer. So for those who prefer to always “clean” install even upgrading provides a clean install experience now.

Support for the DISM (DISM.exe) tool. This tool combines the functionality of several tools. Including ImageX Package Manager (Pkgmgr.exe), the International Settings Configuration Tool (Intlcfg.exe), and the Windows PE command-line tool (PEimg.exe). With this tool you can mount WIM files, inject drivers and add in language packs, perform offline servicing, and many other useful tasks.

Finally the Windows Automated Installation Kit or WAIK has added the ability to create bootable VHD drives, (now that we can boot from a VHD drive we’ll need a way to make them bootable!)

Currently the only scenario being supported by Windows 7 is Lite touch deployment. As development on Windows 7 continues I’m positive will start to see the zero touch installation take shape around the SCCM (System Center Configuration Manager)

To download MDT 2010 beta you need to apply to the beta on Microsoft Connect: http://connect.microsoft.com