Microsoft has just released as a public beta the newest version of Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2012 with a few important updates:

• Supporting System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2012.
• Using Lite Touch Installation (LTI), great improvements in the client side look-n-feel.
• Also for LTI, behind-the-scenes enhancements for partitioning, UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface), and user state migration.
• Some minor bugs fixed.

MDT 2012 Requirements

Same as MDT 2010:

• Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK) 2.0. You can download it from here.
  Note: The download page indicates that the WAIK version is “1”; but don’t worry, the actual version is 2.0.
• MSXML 6.0
• PowerShell.
• .Net Framework 3.5 SP1. Available for download here.
  Note: Even though .Net Framework 2.5 SP1 is not a requirement for MDT 2010 installation; one of its features, User-Driven Installation (UDI), does requires the latest Microsoft Framework installed.

MDT 2012 Look-n-Feel

For what I’ve seen so far, the user experience of the Deployment Workbench console is pretty much the same.

Also, the “Help Topics” are the same used in MDT 2010. But don’t worry, this is completely normal in this Beta version.

MDT 2012 Beta 1 Download

The beta is available in this link from Microsoft Connect, and I’m pretty sure that I’ll be testing it soon enough.

To check my previous posts about step-by-step deployments using Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT), please check the articles in MDT Category.

Cheers!