One of the most challenging aspects of my career has been working with Windows Drivers. I have spent the last several years looking for ways to reduce my Driver footprint, and I'm sure my situation is not unique

Driver Automation Tool

Let my start by saying that the Driver Automation Tool is the Gold Standard for Driver Management. MVP Maurice Daly has done an exceptional job and this is what you should be using in your Enterprise

If you are already invested in this, stick with it. You would be a complete fool to use anything else

My Challenges

I'll be the first to admit that as beautiful as Maurice's Driver Automation Tool is, its not a good fit for my Enterprise, so in this section of OSDeploy, I'll play the part of The Fool and detail as much as I can about my approach and why

Portability

The biggest need that I have with all methods of Driver Management is that I need a small footprint. I don't need Automation, or simplicity. I'll gladly trade the conveniences if I can reduce the size of my Driver Repository.

I work for a large Oil Services company and support about 40,000 computers, soon to be 70,000. We are Global, and I have to support systems wherever the oil is. Most of these computers are connected in the Office, but a very large number of computers are not. They don't sit on our Domain, but rather, on a Rig in the middle of the Gulf, a Vessel in the middle of the ocean, or even in the back of a Truck. These are my Workgroup computers

Additionally, I support computers that sit in Offices ... but these are not typical Offices. These are Offices that are connected through a Satellite link in Africa, Asia, or the Middle East.

I have to support all of these systems. So when I manage my OS Images and Drivers, I need them to be small. I need Portability

Universal

Another challenge that I have is that I need to be able to image a computer with Windows 10 in several different scenarios to support my Enterprise, so however I decide to Manage and Deploy Drivers, it must be Universal. These are some of the

• Network Connected

• Network Disconnected

• ConfigMgr

• MDT

• Windows Setup

• USB

• ISO

• WinPE Dism

• Clean OS Install

• OS Upgrade

• Domain

• Workgroup

• Many, many different Comptuer Models

Too many Computer Models

By far the largest hurdle I have is the number of Computer Models that I have to support. My company is a Dell shop, and we keep computers for much longer than I would like, so unfortunately, I have to support 115 different Computer Models on Windows 10

Next Steps

The rest of OSDDrivers will detail how I try to manage my Drivers to overcome my challenges