I’ll give you an out line of our setup and then the problem.
We have 116 sites with device numbers ranging from 5 to 400 per site.
We have policies that control the “core” software we need on each device. Policies work as required, they detect the software is present or not and install ASAP if its not.
We don’t have maintenance windows. The sites are all schools so there is never a time frame adequately for maintenance tasks.
When we image a machine there are various tasks that need to be run as part of the “job”, after the ghost session has completed and the sysprep finishes. These include joining domain, power options, installing flash, java, setting various options and importantly, installing additional drivers.
Our problem is that when the ghost/sysprep process is complete, the agent picks up the policies it requires and focuses on doing these and not carrying out the remaining tasks of the imaging process. In a room of 20 devices you can end up with 1 having missed a task(s) or 19! It’s a random.
Ideally we would like to leave policies switch on all the time but be able to force the agent to complete the imaging tasks sent to it as a priority.
If that’s not possible, then be able to schedule the enable/disable of policies so they could be off while the machines image and automatically enable after say 1h 30mins once we’re sure all imaging task have been complete.
Its not a huge issue when its a machine here, machine there but currently we're rolling out Windows 7 to each site so there are a lot of machines involved in each ghost session and we'll have done 9000 by the time we're done. The process needs to be as issue free as possible.
Anyone have any thoughts or solutions? Could we do something with Filters and check files?
Thanks for reading to the end!