Mac OSX Best Imaging Practices

[adman29]

Hey everyone, so I thought that this would help some of the SysAdmins, Project Managers, and general helpdesk staff on the forum who have to deal with the awfulness that is the Mac Environment for imaging. At my current job we're going through the realm of ~50 2012 MacBook Pros & ~150 2015 MacBook Airs, and getting them ready for new staff, and I wanted to at least share my process for interns to go through to get them ready. If you want to add, please add any tips or better practices that you may have found in your time, as this is more likely than not the actual best practice seeing that we've wrecked our internet connection in to the building a few times. Anyways, here's my current process

1. Do a OSX System Restore (Cmd + Alt + R, or on older firmwares just Cmd + R)
2. Set up the account, and download OSX High Sierra (Newest OSX at the moment)
3. Run the High Sierra Installer 
4. Install Microsoft Office off of a .iso file from a local server
5. Mark it as done and put it in a pile

[DrMacintosh]

Time Machine backups? 

[PapaRobotnik]

Check it. 

If what I understand is that you are looking put one image (Operating system, user and apps) on all the Macbooks; one way is to clone the partition to a few external SSDs (or HDs if you don't have demanding time constraints) by using Disk Utility. 

Enter Recovery mode on the laptops, open Disk Utility, then restore the laptops with the clones from the SSDs.

 

There is a way to do this over a network, but I'll leave that answer up to a more seasoned veteran. :-)