The Realm of the Verbal Processor

UDI Application Weirdness

One of the really cool aspects of MDT 2010 Update 1 is the integration of what was formerly known as Modena…now named “User Driven Installation”. This provides a very slick looking wizard that can pop up at the beginning of a task sequence to allow for customization of the OSD process. There is a lot of functionality there around computer naming, domain/workgroup joining, OU selection, adding a user to the local admin group, language selection, and others. The feature that most of my clients are interested in however is the ability to customize application deployment for apps that are not in the image (Project, Visio, Acrobat, etc).

There has been one aspect of this that has caused issues on multiple occasions that I figured was worthy of a detailed blog post. The issue comes up if you use the default configuration file (UDIWizard_Config.xml) as your starting point when you run through the UDI Wizard Designer. After customizing the applications section, you still see the default applications screen when the wizard runs…either using the “Preview OSDWizard” command or running it in a Task Sequence. What you see is:

Digging into that default XML file shows us why this issue comes up. First you will notice that one of the “Preflight” checks that is performed is the “Application Discovery” check.

This allows you to configure app replacement in a re-image scenario (i.e. if Office 2007 is installed, install Office 2010…if Acrobat 9 is installed, install Acrobat X…if EditPlus is installed, install Notepad++). This really is a cool feature. However…if you haven’t configured this aspect it’s not necessary to run the check, so you can just delete it. However…deleting that from the Preflight does not clean up the other references to it in the XML file. If you edit the XML directly you will notice the following lines down in the Application configuration section. Note that there is still a reference to the AppDiscovery preflight check.

<Page Name="ApplicationPage" Behavior="enabled">
      <Applications Link.Uri="preflight\AppDiscovery\AppDiscoveryresult.xml" TsAppBaseVariable="PACKAGES" RootDisplayName="Applications">

Removing the reference in the “Link.Uri” attribute resolves the issue. That section should look like:

<Page Name="ApplicationPage" Behavior="enabled">
        <Applications Link.Uri="" TsAppBaseVariable="PACKAGES" RootDisplayName="Applications">

After doing so, you will see the customized application section that you configured using the wizard:

August 25, 2011 - Posted by Jarvis | ConfigMgr, MDT 2010