Systems Deployment

It's all in the word..."image management" :). IMO, It's your entire imaging creation, distribution, and processess. If you have an image created, how do you update it? How is it replicated to different sites? What versioning system do you use? What update/release cycle do you have? What's your policy for out-of-cycle updates? What change controls in place? How is the documentation kept up? Is it modular to simplify updating? What components are in it? What's the standardized testing process? QA?

Those are just the the questions off the top of my head that would need to encompass your image management setup.

This is, of course, if you're not referring to simply WIM, lol. In which case it's the imaging format used by Microsoft.

G'luck!
Jay

Which are the tools, used for this?

There is no single tool, that I've come across, that does all these things for you. It's not just "plug in here, and done" concept. It's like saying, "what tool handles project management" ? You have tools that are part of the process, such as image creation, capturing, and distribution tools (altiris, sms, ghost, radia, etc) but it's not just a matter of learning how to use a tool since the majority of the questions I posted above are procedural.

Jay is right, there is so much more to it than "Creating an Image", and a lot of companies miss the point with this.

The Microsoft Deployment Toolkit is a good place to start. It is free (always a bonus) and has a lot of documentation with it around image life cycles.

It also helps put structures in place for image maintenance and feeds into SMS and SCCM.