Beginner programmer with a huge project (automated configs)

[ryanam]

Hi All,

I've been studying VB for about 3 weeks now, having never done any kind of development before. My understanding is growing but obviously has a long way to go yet.

I was recommended AutoIT by my manager actually. I need to look around it first and check FAQs for actual usage instructions!

As IT support, it's my responsibility to image and configure Lenovo T500s/T410s with Windows 7. I will list the step which I believe could probably be automated.

Please, if you find time, let me know if this stuff can be automated. We can go from there.

- Rename client

- Add client to domain

- Give domain user local admin rights

(When logged in as user)

- Add specific bookmarks to Firefox (or Chrome... I'm easy on that)

Any information regarding automating these steps would be great. There are about 25 of them but I'm just going through the ones I think are most likely to be automated.

Any questions, please let me know

Thanks in advance

Ryan

[GiulioM]

Uhmm, I think you should definitely begin working on simple (or at least easier) projects before doing this kind of things.

[water]

Welcome to AutoIt and the forum!

Everything Active Directory related can be done using my AD UDF (for download please see my signature).

Edited December 5, 2012 by water

[DOTCOMmunications]

You could also look into using Windows Deployment Services either alone or in combination with the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit which would allow you to do virtually all of this automatically with maybe a few short autoit scripts to do anything that MDT doesn't have built in scripts for.

We recycle old computers on a regular basis so get a wide variety of different machines that obviously first need their drivers adding to MDT but after we can setup a machine, PXE boot to our network and then just enter the product key and our domain login details and off the machine goes. There a couple of small AutoIT scripts in the actual task sequence that we use for storing the machine ID and moving reports etc but after those (which are the first step in windows) the rest of the build and deployment is automated including application installation, windows updates and domain configuration.