Systems Deployment

Even better - I wrote it (with the help of the rest of the BDD team of course) [;)]

-Michael Niehaus
Software Design Engineer
mniehaus@microsoft.com

I am in the process of standing it up in our production environment. We are deploying Vista on Monday to 35 systems. So far so good, just a few more bugs to work out and we should be good.

We went through a successful and very productive DDPS session with Microsoft consultants (Chris B.) which probably saved us months of research.

Prior to BDD, my integration team used BDD framework to build our own version of it. This was 3 years ago when we migrated to XP and at the time we were way ahead of the desktop deployment headaches that most organizations have been going through up until now. We had a single image strategy which worked approximatly 30 different hardware platforms which included desktops, laptops, and tablet PC's.

Now, the amount of work we put into this to get it to that point was enormous. What BDD gives you out-of-the-box surpases what we had to the point that we through out what we had been working on for the past 3 years and adopted the Lite Touch methodology immediately. In time, we also see the need for Zero Touch in our environment but this will be the next phase in oue desktop project.

The official BDD 2007 far exceeds my expectations on ease of use and flexibility and comes complete with the framework that any organization can adopt to help them plan and execute a successful desktop/server deployment and continued management.

I salute the Mikes (Niehaus and Lewis) and the rest of the BDD team on the work they have done as it has made my life so much easier (at work) and given me the time to research other technologies that we never had the time or resources to consider.

Dan V.

P.S. Hey Mike, can I email you with some questions? :)

I am currently setting it up to create a base image that I will later capture and send to the SMS ditribution points for deployment (OSD).

I do not like the installation of applications within the BDD because I need apps to run sequencial, and for the BDD to wait until the app install is finished before going on to the next install.

App installs just fire off, with multiple installs going on and I can't have that.

I currently have one script that sets the Explorer Shell = Shell.cmd, a custom shell I have that calls each app in a specific order.

It is very reliable.

However, I have to boot to a PE environment and connect to the network to start the process.
BDD 2007 at least allows me to skip a few steps.

If it would run my apps in order and wait for each one to finish, I could use it exclusively.

have you used the Distribution -> Applications -> Application Properties -> dependencies tab to order install sequence.

No I haven't. It's just because I have some 40 or 50 apps to install and didn't want to set dependencies after dependencies.

So in the intrest of time (I have a dead line), I decided to continue using my script.

However, I will try that!

Thanks!

And I'll let you know the results...

I use the dependencies and it works really well.

All you need to do is enter all of your applications into the BDD. Then setup to order you want them to install in.
Really, this shouldn't take you more then an hour of data entry (setting up your applications) as 'it just works'.