Useful apps to include on a base image for Windows 7

[ranj]

Hi Folks

 

I just planning on how we will be deploying Windows 7 in our school. My idea is to have 4 different builds of machines.

 

Base Image (Windows with Office and apps which every computer needs)

Classroom Image (Software used by teachers in lessons)

Admin/office Image (Software used by support staff and other non teachers)

IT Rooms Image (Pupil Software which needs to be available to students as well as some teacher software for staff to go into an IT room when there own classroom is busy)

 

At the moment I am concentrating on just the Base Image, the minimum software which will be on every machine in the building.

 

At the moment I am thinking the base image will have the following:

 

Windows 7

Office 2010

Adobe Flash Player

.Net Framework

Java Runtime

Silverlight

Movie Maker

Windows 7 Admin Pack

Quicktime

Windows Media Encoder

VLC and other Media codecs for any computer to play the majority of video and audio content.

Windows updates

 

PDF Printer (thinking of hosting this on a server) so it can updated easily when an upgrade comes out.

I also thinking whether we should put Sophos on this base build or just use Sophos Management console to rollout the antivirus once the machine is built.

 

Does anyone know of anything else which would be useful to add to this base image. I am not interested in any school specific software just useful apps which would be useful for every user in the building regardless of role.

 

Any advice would be most appreciated.

[danrhodes]

If you a thread search this has been covered a few times previously!

[DrCheese]

I'd avoid making billions of images if possible, one major advantage of windows 7 is that you can get away with one image for all HAL types. Just lock anything that you don't want the students to have access to with group policy, eg We put SIMS on our images.

Your list is close to mine, but I'm not sure you need Quicktime anymore since Windows media player 12 plays .mov files with no issues. You will only run into problems if you have software that looks for quicktime directly, or viewing quicktime videos on websites (Which is really only apple.com nowadays)

 

I try to keep things like Sophos/Adobe reader/flash etc off our builds since they can easily be put out via group policy after its been imaged, tho it's down to your personal preference if you do that or not.

[Mr.Ben]

I'm making it as basic as possible:

 

Avoid any applications which are likely to need constant updating throughout the year (Java, Flash, FoxIt, Silverlight)

 

So Windows 7 and Office 2010,

All the 2 Simple stuff we have (as that is so rarely updated, and GPOing 30 titles takes an age,

SIMS & FMS

 

That's about it.

[danrhodes]

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