LiveBlogging from Office/Vista/Exchange Launch in Denver
I'm attending the Office/Vista/Exchange Launch event in Denver today and am taking some time to LiveBlog a few things from the event. In the bowels of this huge convention center, there's nothing to speak of in terms of wireless, but my new Sprint card means you get a (slow) connection anywhere.
So far, we're discussing Microsoft's Business Desktop Deployment (BDD) tools and the steps for deploying Vista desktops and packages over the top of Vista. A couple of interesting things learned so far:
Most of this stuff I'm sure you've already seen before. But, it's always worth a review.
- The Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK) includes all the bits and bytes you need to create system deployment images, manipulate images, and even deploy images.
- The BDD tools are a set of additional tools that compliment the WAIK. Whereas the WAIK tools are highly command-line driven. The BDD tools add a skin over the top of the WAIK tools to make the deployment much easier.
- BDD is also intended to be a compilation of knowledgebase articles related to desktop deployment, so you don't have to go to TechNet for help.
- All O/S's from Vista and beyond are deployed using Windows PE. Previous versions of Windows PE were available to Enterprise Agreement customers only, but the version used with Vista is freely available to everyone.
- Interestingly enough, Windows PE is a moderately-featured O/S all to itself. There are ways of adding in robust functionality into PE. However, it will auto-reboot after 72 hours and has some other interesting mechanisms that prevent it from being used as an O/S.
I've played with both BDD and WAIK before. If you decide to use them, you'll need some coding skills to make them work in an acceptable way. Plus, you're limited to deploying a single machine at a time. But, for the cost, they'll work in some deployments.
Hopefully, we'll get to Exchange 2007 soon.
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