Microsoft is deeming the Surface Pro 3 as the next company device. It is the businessperson’s dream with its small and light form factor making it great for mobility while still packing a powerful punch to provide you with a complete operating system. Now, you have to figure out how to get it built and deployed in your environment. While it is not a whole lot different from laptops, you might run into a few hang ups. Hopefully, this post will help you avoid some of them.
The tools that I used to deploy the Surface Pro 3:
- Microsoft’s System Center Configuration Manager 2012 R2
- USB Ethernet Adapter
- USB Hub
- USB Flash Drive
Before it is too late, my first piece of advice is to create a USB recovery drive. This will come in handy when your task sequence accidentally formats the recovery partition or maybe you do while troubleshooting why your Surface is not building correctly. Either way, I found out it is a lot easier to have it handy. If you forget, no worries! You can download a recovery image for your Surface from Microsoft.
Next, I went out and got the drivers for the Surface and imported them into Configuration Manager. Microsoft makes this pretty easy with the driver packs they put together. If you have not imported drivers into Configuration Manager, Ronni Pederson has a pretty good article on importing drivers for OSD in ConfigMgr 2012. After these are imported, we will need to add the network driver for your USB Ethernet Adapter into your boot image. You will also need to add your drivers to the task sequence. The Auto Apply Drivers step works very well with the Surface drivers and simply adding the new category works like a charm.
Up to here, it has been pretty routine to creating any other task sequence for any model. If you have not built a task sequence before, there are plenty of good articles out there to help you get started. The first thing I hope to save you from is figuring out that you need a 64-bit boot image. The Surfaces do not work with 32-bit images since they contain 64-bit UEFI motherboards. This was not the first thing that came to mind when trying to boot to the 32-bit media on a USB flash drive. The screen just flashed and rebooted. A lot of time was spent figuring out if the correct button combination was being used to boot a Surface from a USB device, UEFI settings were set appropriately, etc. Once you have your boot image, you can either deploy via PXE or task sequence media. If using task sequence media, a USB hub will be needed. With the Surface only having one USB port, this is handy so that you can use both the USB ethernet adapter and the USB task sequence media.
From here, it was pretty much smooth sailing. It was easy to integrate into our Windows 8.1 task sequence. We have had some complaints of the Surface running hot and the fan being loud. These complaints have been echoed throughout many technical forums and blogs, but for the most part, the users love their Surfaces. They enjoy the fact that it is so mobile, touch/writing friendly, a complete operating system, and much more.
Hope this saved you a few headaches and gets you headed in the right direction. Good luck!
tl;dr version
- Create a USB recovery drive
- Get Surface Pro 3 driver pack from Microsoft
- Use a 64-bit boot image
- Add USB ethernet adapter to boot image
- If PXE is not available, use a USB hub for Task Sequence Media and USB Ethernet Adapter
- Use Auto Apply Drivers step for applying drivers in task sequence
- Easy to integrate with current Windows 8.1 task sequence