I've been patently impressed with Microsoft's moves towards making the manual installation of Server 2008 as easy and short as possible. Throughout the beta period, we've seen the elimination of virtually all of the mouse clicks and configurations from the installation routine itself. All of the elements you formerly needed to configure during the installation have been moved to the post-installation wizard called Initial Configuration Tasks.

This change means no more painful waiting by the terminal for the installation to pause from time-to-time to ask a question.

Well, I just downloaded the RTM code for Server 2008 this morning and began my first server installation. And lo and behold, I discover that between RC1 and RTM they've gone yet another step in simplifying the installation routine.

In RC1 one step necessary to start the install was entering the license key (or agreeing to enter it in later). Now, even that step has been moved to post-installation. This means that the manual installation of Server 2008 has been reduced down to a minimum of seven mouse clicks! Remarkable!

(UPDATE: I'll add a disclaimer to this that I am downloading my Server 2008 media from the TechNet site. I haven't checked retail media, which may be different, because I don't have access to any at this time.)

This level of rapid deployment for the most basic manual installation is seriously giving our old script-based and image-based automated installations a run for their money.