Overview

In a fit of perhaps unwarranted optimism we have initiated a live pilot of Windows 7 for a bunch of users in our company environment. There are a number of good reasons for this which we laid out in an invitation flyer to the volunteers/victims, i.e.:

• Expose internal systems and consultancy teams to the latest Microsoft desktop deployment technologies and operating system.
• Provide backwards-compatibility with existing in-use OS (Win XP) to allow a single approach for all internal OS imaging tasks.
• Provide front office staff with exposure to the new Microsoft OS and collect data on the real-world performance.
• Implement Microsoft Application Virtualization to provide a rapid application provisioning platform.

We are running this as we would for a live customer, so have completed a costed proposal and scoping exercise and are implementing the technologies involved in a structured and managed way. We’re taking the opportunity to implement App-V along with the Windows 7 pilot. The logic behind this is:

1. App-V is great. It’s an excellent application provisioning solution and will deliver a real benefit to our support department from day one.
2. The Windows 7 pilot will result in the building and re-building of PCs throughout the pilot process. If we don’t have to worry about the apps (as we’ll stream them to AD groups) this makes our rebuild process more efficient and supportable.
3. We’re implementing a new VDi training environment at the same time, App-V is a great solution for this environment too, the apps are the same in both environments, once sequenced the apps will be reusable in both environments.

Deployment Approach

We’re using the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (of course) v. 2010 Beta 1. This is a technology we’re very familiar with as we use it for our customers (normally integrated with ConfigMgr). In this environment we’re using Lite Touch deployment (ZTI isn’t currently supported and we don’t have ConfigMgr deployed anyway).

Under MDT 2010 we’ve been able to create and capture a reference image with our core apps in the usual way, but the deployment of this image does not function correctly under Beta 1 of the MDT. The main problems are that the image build doesn’t join the domain or process the State Restore phase of the build, so no apps get deployed. Along with this, as the local administrator is disabled by default in Windows 7 we have to use SIM to add an additional local admin account, otherwise we can’t log onto the newly installed image.

Other than these little irritations it works, but isn’t yet fully deployable, so we’re holding off for MDT 2010 Beta 2 which is due out any time now…

We’ve currently tested out Lite-Touch New Computer scenarios and the Refresh Computer scenarios which work (above issues aside) well. USMT 4 in particular is a very interesting piece of kit and is going to make a huge difference to our deployment time some of our users have over 100GB local data!!!).

Task Sequence Tips and Tricks

We’re taking the opportunity to try out some Gucci little tips and tricks during this build to pretty up the process, things which we don’t normally have the time or scope for with customer engagements.

Minimize startnet.cmd

Mainly these are little bits of cosmetics, the first being minimizing the startnet.cmd at runtime using David Clarke’s rather marvellous ConsoleSize. To get this in place is slightly arduous, you have to add it to PE and modify startnet.cmd to run it before winpeinit, which involves mounting the WAIK copy of winpe.wim (this is then used by MDT to build our custom PE wim/iso… It works, and means that we can reap the benefit of the next little tweak:

Use Custom Backgrounds to Illuminate the Build Progress

At this year’s MMS, The Microsoft Modena Team demonstrated using BGInfo and a number of custom backgrounds to brand up the build process. Essentially this calls BGinfo at the start of critical phases of the build to repaint the wallpaper and tell the engineer/end user where the build is up to. This looked pretty cool, so we’ve put it in place in our build process.

Communications

Throughout the pilot we’re providing the participants with regular project flyers detailing some of the new features of Windows 7 which they might want to try out that aren’t immediately obvious (Aero Shake for example…).

We’ll be collecting feedback on these features to get some real-world insight into which features of 7 are delivering benefit to the non-tech users we have.

I’ll be adding in further postings as the project progresses, particularly around App-V, USMT and of course Windows 7 itself.