The Drivers Saga continues – How to Master Drivers in ConfigMgr 2012

Johan Arwidmark has a nice new post on driver management. Always a fun topic to discuss.

Read the full post here.

A new chapter in the driver’s saga has been written; this time it will teach you how to master drivers in ConfigMgr 2012

Background story:

Since the release of ConfigMgr 2007 I have recommended taking control of your drivers, using a method known as “Total Control” as opposed to the default “Total Chaos” method in ConfigMgr. In the previous guide one of the options described was to create driver packages in ConfigMgr 2007, without even importing the drivers. This method was actually possibly because of a bug in ConfigMgr 2007 (I like to call it a feature, but never mind). I really liked that method because it was super-quick and easy to both setup and maintain, not to mention that I didn’t have to store the drivers twice on the server and got an easy-to-read folder structure instead of the {guid} named folders ConfigMgr 2007 generated.

But guess what, in ConfigMgr 2012 Microsoft fixed the bug, which rendered the above method impossible. In ConfigMgr 2012 you really have to import the drivers, whether you like it or not. The change in ConfigMgr 2012 also prevents you from migrating existing driver packages from ConfigMgr 2007 (If they were created without importing the drivers). Luckily, if you did follow the previous guide, you already have a perfect driver structure, and in this post you learn how to use the exact same structure for ConfigMgr 2012…..