In the interest of debate, I'll share my experiences with deployments. I've done deploys at least 3 different ways and I've found the two best are Unattended and standard images with deployed MSI software.
I setup a High School lab with about 100 computers of 3 different hardware types. Initially I did a ghost deploy with all the software ready to go, but this stopped being effective after several pieces of software were added mid school year, it was not easy to update all 3 different images with the new software, so instead we deployed the image then added the additional software. The next year I tried something different, I did a very minimal install of the OS, and had all the major software deploy via group policy and MSI. They are still using this method 2 years later. I do worry that someday it will all fall apart because I did have to re-package 2 applications. It seemed to work just fine, but I had to harvest all the junk out of the msi that isn't part of the installation. It was very time consuming, but when a PC would not boot or something was majorly wrong with it, instead of spending time troubleshooting, it was faster to use the imaging cds and then let the software deploy, it took about an hour, but it was all hands off and we didn't have to wait till after 3:00 because multicasting was strangling the network. Now I'm using unattended for a different purpose, trying it out for OEM builds. So far it seems the most flexible, it doesn't matter what the hardware is, it's a lot like RIS without the concern of having a PXE network card and it automates the software installs. Phil Ellis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Windows 2000�MCSE & MCSA ------------------------------------------------------- SF email is sponsored by - The IT Product Guide Read honest & candid reviews on hundreds of IT Products from real users. Discover which products truly live up to the hype. Start reading now. http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_ide95&alloc_id396&op=click _______________________________________________ unattended-info mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/unattended-info
