I work in a large Secondary in South Yorkshire around 1200 systems including curriculum laptops and desktops. Number grown significantly since 2004. When I arrived in 98 deployments involved Windows 98/NT CD (later on XP) office cd, memorising product keys and running from computer to computer. All our systems were networked. Oh yeah it needed plenty of patience and generated frustration. We were a net ware School at this time.
We bout zen works and I bought a £70 netware 4 book to learn netwre4/zenworks. The most expensive book I ever bought was also the heaviest, thickest and took the longest to read. However once read setting up and deploying os via zenworks was a piece of cake. All said even taking into account the £70 book (out of my pocket) it paid for it self many times over in time saved from how we were doing things.
This worked well for a year and then as the government threw money at us we bought more pc's and thus needed more Netware licenses. However Netware had decided they didn't need us and the pricing of the upgrade to netware 5 and additional cal's werea rip off.
So Advanced Server 2000 was the route we were forced down. Much cheaper on server and cal licences and of course much tighter server / desktop integration.
So we looked at Ghost but too £££ for us so RIS which was free was what we used. Simple to setup, easy to use and reliable at deployment too. The only gotcha was with the nic .inf file. Get the right one or edit your own and happy days.
Until threw more money at the school and we had to get best value so now had varied hardware from multiple vendors and thus multiple images which soon grew into a full time task to maintain.
The buggers threw e-vouchers at the school and allowed departments to spend them on software they never sorry always use and that now had to be deployed so more growth in apps and gpo's to push them out which resulted in ear bindings about how annoying it was that application x that installed once (per machine) at startup meant that they couldn't use the machine for teaching and that deploying to 30 machines a 100mbit network was a no no we ended up using lunches after school etc installing apps .
Other stuff didn't get done our ears got bent even more. We got SMS 2003 which is now config manager 2007. Initially we used RIS to boot the os deploy env but quickly moved to WDS.
Over the years we moved to a single XP image across our broad range of hardware of a wide vintage. We have added in all th os in between and added hundreds of applications many of which we had to engineer our own msi's for as the authors couldn't manage anything but an exe for their crap vb or java based educational software. It's better now but educational software was the worst I have ever come across for reliability / ease of installation and deployment. They just assumed that you were installing to a single pc that you always had full admin right for and that you never ever installed other application or updates ever. They expected exactly the same if you were installing on 30.
Once company who's product cause me untold grief was Nelson Thornes. It was part of a package of ks3 science software and textbooks. If you installed a different version of flash, java or any other software it would stop working. I wrote a ripping letter to them and my line manager about how poor that particular software was and they admitted it was poor and that the folks who had written it for them had been asked to make changes to it but they wouldn't.
Anyway with Vista onwards it's heaven (or xp with the unsupported Hal switcher script) its deployment heaven. build your own list of install instructions per room (task sequences) to partition, format hard drive. Install os with key. Install drivers from a bank of drivers already imported into Configmgr. Install Applications and then shut down. All from a simple edited list of steps that once created is your customised imaging checklist per room.
New systems? Import any drivers from the supplier driver cd if they're not already used in another image somewhere. Pick the os to be deployed and add the list of software you want installed. Name the task sequence and advertise it to a collection or group of your new pc's that youhave manually added into configmgr along with their mac address and you're done!
Configmgr will install in a couple of hours. Then you gradually customise configmgr to make it work how you want. The more you expect the longer it takes to customise but once you are happy with your customisation it becomes very easy to maintain. Task sequences can be duplicated in a mouse click. Edit to customise and bang you've got a dedicated setup for a particular room or department.
You can do a lot more with configmgr too. Asset management, reporting (ie how many of my pcs have less than 512mb of ram and which ones are they?) App deployment Patch deployment. Remote Control clients, search all your systems for a specific file.
Well, I was intending a quick reply and ended up typing all this apologies. Oh and I still have the £70 netware 4 book if someone wants to buy it. Can't face throwing that money away and maybe one day when all the fossil fuels are used it can keep me warm.
Andy
All the comments are my own personal opinions and do not reflect the position of my employer or anyone else.
