Note: As you may have seen in my other question regarding the data integrity of a .wim, I know this is a very "rigged" method of doing things. I've been the one heading up that whole area for our department, but given how fast we've been needing things done and how thin we're all stretched, I haven't been able to get a concrete method down and pretty much went with the first reliable-looking method just to keep our heads above water.
Are there any practices that are especially solid in this area? As of now we're loading up a virtual machine on a local PC, installing Windows 7, customizing it, doing a sysprep, booting the VM into a WinPE environment, mapping the host machine's drive as a network resource, then doing a "network" capture. After that, the .wim is copied onto an external HDD to be used with a WinPE usb for individual deployments. As for drivers, we used Double Driver to throw those in after the first boot after imaging. Slipstreaming those in with automatic hardware configuration detection to determine which to throw in on each individual machine would be VERY useful.
Our business is growing pretty fast, so I'm looking for a way to further simplify the process of imaging. Knowing generally how to IT world works, I just KNOW there has to be some way to dependably image multiple computers at a time from a network resource without the need to manually do anything to the target computers (except maybe PXE boot them), but I just don't know what it is. You have no idea how much I'd appreciate any assistance here!