Add the ability to deploy and manage drivers post OS deployment
what would be great to see is a mechanism which would allow for the deployment of drivers to client computers post the OSD. ideally it would be fantastic if it can use the same driver package as is used in the OS Deployment to save the administrative overhead needing to have 2 different ways to deploy updated drivers like we need to today where we package the drivers for OS deployment, while to deploy to the existing hardware we need to depend upon the vendors installation package which in some cases don't allow silent installation so requires a large amount of effort to deploy.
Steven hosking
shared this idea
9 comments
-
Anonymous
commented
Yes especially if you're managing machines in magnitude of 100K+
-
Anonymous
commented
This is the most underrated ask. Given the number of HW (driver, BIOS, firmware, etc) vulnerabilities that are announced on a daily basis, this functionality is imperative for updating drivers/BIOS/firmware on already deployed machines.
-
Mike
commented
I believe that the "Apply Driver Package task sequence step must be run in the WinPE environment, so that might be a problem
-
Glenn Turner
commented
Could you do this with a single Apply Drivers task sequence step and set it to run hidden?
-
Mike
commented
Windows has long had a function to update drivers in Device Manager on a single computer by allowing a user to search for an update. I'm not sure what resources are searched, but it would seem like SCCM could be a source in a managed environment and SCCM should provide an automated and scalable way to apply drivers to end points. In my thoughts, there should be a method to target models with a deployment for a specific driver type (e.g. video, network, etc.)
-
Jason
commented
We do it using a pnputil command in powershell. It seems like Microsoft could add a check box to the apply drivers step to run a pnputil command to recurse all the INFs in the package. Then you could use the same driver package used for OS Deployments. Agreed. This is long overdue.
-
C-E Betant
commented
ideally getting this functionality leveraging drivers published in Windows Update and being able to use/import only the ones linked to defined vendor/models
-
Matthew DeBoer
commented
This would provide a nice single pane of glass.
If you are interested, rather than using the vendor's install package, you can use devcon.exe from the Windows driver kit to complete a silent install:
1. Get the PCIID from the hardware in WMI:
select * from win32_pnpentity Where Name like 'Intel%Graphics%'2. Use Devcon to install the appropriate driver for the pciid you found:
devcon.exe update "PathTo.inf" "PCIID"This will install the inf for the specified PCIID. You will want to be careful as this will upgrade/downgrade any drivers.
-
Tom Howard
commented
This is definitely long overdue. Microsoft makes the recommendation to update drivers, but does not provide a means of easily doing so with their flagship endpoint management solution.