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Data#3, an Australian based Systems Integrator and Microsoft Gold Certified Partner are currently 'dog fooding' the Windows 7 Release Candidate.
We invite you to follow our deployment of Windows 7 in real time.
Data#3, an Australian based Systems Integrator and Microsoft Gold Certified Partner are currently 'dog fooding' the Windows 7 Release Candidate.
We invite you to follow our deployment of Windows 7 in real time.
Week 2 of Production Deployment
I am currently blogging about my Windows 7 Deployment experience. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
We are in week 2 of deployment, and shortly we’ll have deployed the Windows 7 SOE to around half of the fleet. We’ll ramp it up again next week and should hit our target date for deployment by 09/09/09. We have been averaging about 30 machines per day fairly comfortably, with a 3 days on 2 days off approach to the deployment schedule. By that, I mean we are deploying heavily Monday – Wednesday. Thursday we tidy up and address issues that have been raised during the week; and Friday we get all our ducks in a row ready to hit the ground running at 8am the following Monday.
For me, Thursday and Friday are the most important days. Learning from our experiences during the week and putting measures in place to improve the speed and accuracy of the deployment for the following week, ensures that we are constantly improving our process.
Speaking of lessons learned, have I mentioned yet just how much I hate PST files?! USMT 4.0 does a fine job of finding PST files during state capture, restoring them and ensuring they are appropriately re-connected in the users Outlook profile. We encountered an issue this week where a portion of a PST was locked by a process, and USMT didn’t capture it. Outlook had been shutdown properly. Imagine what would have happened if there wasn’t a backup of that PST? Users are understandably passionate about their mail archives!
To make sure the SCCM task sequence doesn’t continue if such an error is encountered – either use a config.xml file with the <ErrorControl> Section properly configured, or include a script in the task sequence to interrogate scanstate.log and bail out if the error is found.
But if you want to be really, really sure about safely maintaining users’ mail archives – get rid of PSTs altogether and implement an Enterprise email archiving solution. Data#3 will be doing exactly that very soon.
Lesson Learned.