Driver management in ConfigMgr 2007

One of the difficult things in deployment is getting all drivers to work. Best practice here is to remove the "auto-apply drivers" in the Task sequence, and put "add driver package" instead. Most of the time when i'm import drivers, i give them a tag-name for the model. In that way you can easely update or remove a model later. There is also an option for creating folders in it. Bad thing is you can't import a driver multiple times, so that's not a good idea after all. Also the search folder will be a good idea actually.. In that way the folders are query based, so you can seperate the drivers in different folders.

For getting the right driver package on a system, you must put a condition on the driver packages. The most implemented way is by model name of the systems. The command for getting that is by CMD.exe - WMIC /Node - CSProduct Get Name. The result for that command must be placed in the condition of the driver package. The rule for that is "SELECT * FROM Win32_ComputerSystem WHERE Model LIKE "%<MODEL>%" where %<MODEL>% must be replaced with the actual model name. Now you are ready for deploying many types of systems with different driver packages.

But what to do with drivers that are not installed after deployment? There are drivers that won't be installed on the system, whatever you do. For solving that look at the option for creating a software package. If there is a setup-file in that specific driver folder, you can do an unattended install, and put it in your Task sequence. Now you will see that every single driver will be installed. For boot images it's the best to work with the newest NIC drivers for getting it to work. Now you can truly enjoy the "one image" functionality!