My imaging workflow and how to make it better with Casper Suite

[adamcodega]

Hello everyone
I'd like to get some advice on how to improve my imaging workflow with Casper Suite and any other scripts. So here goes:

I have a base OS image captured from a fresh MacBook Air, iWork is included, I have a user creatively named "user" on the image as a placeholder, cause I need to make a user to get through Setup Assistant. This is the base OS image I use in Casper Imaging for all computers.

Employees get either a MacBook Air or a MacBook Pro Retina. Each laptop is used by only one person so they are the only user on their machine, except for the management account.

Casper Imaging writes the operating system, the apps and printer they need (via a smart config per department), it sets the computer name which it asks me for and using the Custom option in Casper Imaging, it creates a user account in their name, which I set manually as I image each computer. I found this a little easier than making a user after the fact.

Once imaging is done, I login as employee with the default password configured through Casper Imaging. I delete the other user named "user" and connect them to Wi-Fi using their 802.1x account. I then clear the dock of most icons my people don't want, which I should be using dockutil for, and then I run Chrome twice so automatic updates are turned on. JSS takes care of keeping their screen saver/security settings in check which is about all we require.

I know this is rather tedious since I'm manually typing in computer names, user accounts and running this or that to get the computer ready. Even if I had a script prompting me for answers that would speed things up. Everything I'm doing here helps speed things up for the user when we get started when they come in on their first day.

So basically, what else can I automate? I'm comfortable setting up workflows with scripts and custom DMGs.

Any help is appreciated.

[evanmellichampe · Accepted solution]

You might consider using AutoDMG to create a never booted base OS that's hardware agnostic. You could then just apply an initial setup script that lays down any number of desired preferences as well as a temporary account that users could use to access a policy in Self Service that allows them to create their own user account based on LDAP credentials.

The other tech that I work with used some great resources to set this up in our environment and it performs really well for us.

[adamcodega]

A bit of an old thread but I wanted to come back and mark best answer because AutoDMG is where I feel a lot of admins need to revolve their image workflow around. It was definitely the direction I needed to go in. If you're like me and seem to have a big workflow or a lot of steps to what your final configuration needs to be, check out Graham Gilbert's Automate Yourself Out Of A Job talk from this year's Penn State MacAdmins conference, he talks a lot about how he builds images/configs/whatyouwannacallit that go beyond the out of the box Apple experience.