Rick Whitworth's Blog

I’ve spent the last several weeks since MMS getting a feel for the new technologies coming with Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2. Our company had a very limited deployment of Windows Vista (mainly is was just IT people), so we never really put a lot of effort into getting the most out of it. However, a good many of us have been running Windows 7 since beta, and we are very happy with it so far. Happy enough that we have started preparing for a roll-out of Windows 7 when it goes RTM. Now, rolling out a new operating system company wide is a task in itself, but we wanted to turn it up a notch and deploy several technologies and change some of our processes while we are it. So, here is a rough sketch of our plans, and what we are doing so far.

1. Deploy the Windows 7 OS in an automated, repeatable pattern
2. Reduce the headache of application deployment by using a combination of Windows Application Virtualization (App-V) and Windows Presentation Virtualization (Terminal Services)
3. Create a new AD Structure so that we can change the way we deploy group policy
4. Use the new User Migration utility to migrate user settings while keeping the files local to the pc (no more copying to the network and back down when the image is complete)
5. Leave Citrix. The value add of Citrix has been reduced with each new Microsoft release as you get more and more of the functionality built-in to Windows.
6. Deploy DirectAccess on Server 2008 R2 to manage clients remotely and provide a consistent experience.
7. Deploy Forefront Sterling

So far, we are focusing our initial efforts around a consistent experience for IT Administrators, as this is our first test group. Here is the scenario I envision:

1. Our image administrator makes enhancements to the base image of the OS.
2. I boot my laptop (or desktop up) and the user migration tool runs and partitions a space for all of my local settings and files
3. The new image is put on the computer
4. The computer is joined to the domain
5. The computer uses group policy to configure OS Settings and Preferences, and deploy a minimum number of apps (I am mainly thinking infrastructure type apps here, like the App-V client of Forefront Client Security)
6. App-V is used to stream down any app that I might run while disconnected (Like Visio, or VLC Media Player)
7. All of my administrator consoles and applications are delivered as TS RemoteApps with icons on the Start Menu. Any app that would be useless to me when disconnected from the network (Like AD Users and Computers or Group Policy Manager) would be published as a seamless TS RemoteApp
8. One off software that I installed manually would need to be re-installed manually, but all of these setup files would already be on my computer because I would have migrated the installation source from the old pc.

Once we are happy with the IT Administrator First Install Experience and the IT Administrator Rebuild Experience, we will focus our efforts on the end user experiences.

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