RTM is imminent, and I’d say I’m just about ready for Open Pilot and full scale deployment. The issues that we identified during Closed Pilot are now down to a manageable list and I’m feeling pretty excited about pulling the trigger.

The issues we identified during closed pilot were fairly trivial; none of which came close to being a showstopper for a move to the new OS. We tidied up the Location fields in AD sites and subnets, and the location fields on each of the published printers so that we could easily provide users with a way to re-connect their own printers once we deploy the new SOE. We changed the way some apps start at first logon, made basic config changes to some OS components and included driver support for a handful of new hardware types that have come out of the woodwork.

I also spent some time planning collections and task sequence variables, so that we could dynamically configure the right region-specific options when we start deploying. I know I said I wasn’t going to use MDT integration with SCCM – and I still haven’t – but I did pinch a few scripts from MDT to make my life a little easier…this post from Michael Petersen was super handy for making good use of Task Sequence variables for customising entries in unattend.xml on the fly: http://blog.coretech.dk/osdeploy/working-with-regional-settings-during-osd/

I’m currently moving all of our SCCM packages from the staging environment in to production, and getting the source pushed around the country to all the distribution points. Bring on RTM!

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