Establishing a Workflow, what do you recommend?

[terryj]

Hello, new to the site, and I came to give InstaDMG a tryout as :

1. I of course have a ton of deployment to do this year

2. am happy with Apple’s SIU, but want something that is easier to build and maintain, especially
with updates.

3. Just find a way to maximize my daywork as much as possible.

So I’ve read JohnDeTroye’s pdf and watched the Webinar, and
I like what I see, and under stand the modular concept,
my only concern is that it seems like building packages,
at least to me, is akin to one at a time disc install,
in that the amount of time gathering up the data and creating the package,
takes as much time as running it off of a cd and installing it.

So, this got me to thinking, and
please tell me if this will work or not:

What if I:

1. Built a “golden” base image, from 10.5 disc, with all my MCX settings
done, network / airport, my OD bindings done, and my base apps installed
(Adobe Reader, MS Office 2004, iLife /iWork, and Google Earth)
and then

2. used for the modular part the 10.5.6 Combo updater, QT updater,
and any other Apple based updates to System and QT only
(all iLife and iWork updates would already be on there)

3. Then Created the image using InstaDMG and then served that
via Apple SIU to NetInstall from?

Would this work?
Thoughts?

PS. I have also tried DeployStudio, but kept having problems with it
finding the Server and never completing deployment.
So for now, I’d like to stay with Apple SIU if I could….

[terryj]

hmm, I see your point about the boot cruft, and read and heard about it in the webinar.

I do often encounter problematic netinstalls with SIU, so it is by no means
perfect, it just happens to once it is compiled and does successfully deploy,
produce successful results, as far as Netinstall is concerned.

So at this point I’d like to hear more
from actual people using instaDMG in working environments,
to deploy to say a lab of 30 iMacs for example.

In using InstaDMG, what have you found to be the best workflow
in deploying?

[Author]

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