Innovative Technology Weblog

It is a couple of days after the Exchange 2007 RTM party at Jeroen’s. 

Although quite late I still had the power to hit the spacebar and press F5 to find the BDD 2007 RC1 build on connect. So a short evaluation 

I started to do an uninstall of a TAP beta and install of the BDD 2007 RC1 bits. That looked alright but after a while I started to have problems. The task sequencer xml was updated and because it is a modified file an uninstall of BDD 2007 TAP beta leaves it behind in the build folder of the OS. So the best thing to do is start over… 

What I did so far… 

 I created a lite touch build with some core apps like Office 2007, Office communicator 2005 and the forefront client and deployed it WDS, works great. 

Then I started with some serious stuff ZTI. i created an OS image with only the sms client (you need it for ZTI) and started to configure ZTI. One of the most interested things is the way BDD 2007 handles drivers. You can configure driver groups (to handle 32 and 64 bit drivers). This is necessary because some vendors do not build their inf’s correct. 

What happens at deployment time is that the BDD scripts check the pnp id’s of the available devices and compare these with available drivers and driver groups on the network. If there is something to use the scripts copy only the necessary drivers! 

The other nice feature is that almost all configuration of BDD 2007 is stored in a handful of xml files so migrating them over to a newer version is easy. 

Anyway, with some struggling because of naming conventions I managed to do a ZTI of XP SP2 and refresh that OS to Vista RTM with office. Other features I tested was dynamic packages, role based packages and make model packages. Dynamic packages is the best, you just drop an image on a machine and at the state restore sequence it start installing previous installed programs based on a stored procedure and some lookups in the SMS DB add/remove programs view of the previous OS. I have to admit I used our own inhouse developed DB tool.

Try it yourself, deployment hasn’t been that easy 

Rob

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 13th, 2006 at 8:04 pm and is filed under Vista. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.