Macs are on the rise in businesses and educational institutions more users are increasingly asking for more Mac support from their workplaces. Supporting Macs means coming up with ways to configure them to run your programs and use a pre-configured operating system images to save your IT department time and energy.

Software like Disk Utility and  Carbon Copy Cloner, which can copy the contents from one Mac’s hard drive to another’s, are fine for imaging individual Macs, but these tools typically don’t scale very well in large environments, and administrators will still need to perform some post-install configuration tasks manually like renaming computers and binding them to directories.

DeployStudio, a free third-party tool that combines the convenience of NetBoot with flexible and customizable tools for automating application installs and post-configuration tasks. If you’ve got a large number of Macs to image and not a lot of time to image them, it may just be the program you’ve been look to use.

DeployStudio can actually be installed and run from any external drive large enough to hold the software, a basic OS X install, and your images and installers; but the best and most convenient DeployStudio setup will use NetBoot to simplify the imaging process.

The install guide is very good and can be found on DeployStudio site. After the install is complete you design the image you want on your mac and “Create a master from volume”. After the volume is captured you mount the volume and create a workflow. The product is that easy.

DeployStudio is free and asks for donations for support. This is great software for any administrator running macs it’s simple, free and easier to use then Apples out of the box tools. I give this software a 5 star rating.