MDT 2012 Application Prequesites & Application Bundles

The Joys of Managing MDT 2012 Deployment Shares…

Sometimes you have applications you install with MDT lite touch that rely on other applications but you only really want to install those apps when and only when you’re installing that specific application. Yeah, welcome to my world.

For example, certain applications (ahem Adobe Acrobat Pro 11) need Visual C++ runtimes installed before they’ll install correctly. Or, maybe you want another app to run after the first application is installed, like an activation script, or a patch.

Here you can see the in the wizard how this works.

Sounds like a nightmare right? Not so with MDT 2012.

Well, how do we do this? Application Bundles.

Take the VCRE 2010 and the Acrobat Pro example.

1 . Add VCRE msi to the share

2 . Add Adobe msi to the share

3. Create a Bundle – Name it accordingly not to confuse it with the standalone you added in step 2.

4. Hide VCE and Adobe in the wizard since you really don’t want somebody trying to do one without the other.

List of Applications in the MDT 2012 Update1 Workbench. Note the Standalone and Bundle named accordingly.

Another clever use is to have an “app” for activating office, so then you create an app that has the command line for the activation, and then do the same, create an application bundle that’ll install office first, THEN run the activation command line syntax. Simply hide the two in the wizard and that way the only app that can be run from the wizard is the bundle, ensuring A then B will run or however you want to associate them.