G
Guest
Hi!
This is a great venue- hopeully I can put in what I have been getting out
for some time (while lurking). Here's my situation as far as Xp deployment
goes:
We are merging two schools, and the new addition has around 150 desktops and
two servers that currently run 2000 Professional and Server. On our existing
school site we have around 60 laptops, seven servers, 60 admin systems (for
school management systems) and 250 desktops. We have been moving our current
equipment to XP Pro and Server 2003 (slowly though) with the help of a
management system for schools that kind of comes with a "prefab"
configuration and than costs a huge amount of money to keep happy.
Here's what we are considering: We are thinking of running the new site as a
kind of test bed for running things "in house" without an external management
solutions. This would involve dekstop deployment ourselves (we want to use a
basic RIS push out which would include within the unattend.txt file our
volume license code for XP); MSI installation of Office 2003; and Group
Polocies to lock down the dekstops without stopping the students from
experiencing something of a real network environment. We would of course move
the servers over to 2003 SP1.
Question: Would this work well? Remember that we are in a school environment
where students range from the not-so-IT-literate to the extreme hacker. Also
imagine that the LAN will seriously expand in size over the next four months
by around 200 machines. And this is why we thought of RIS (we use SysPrep
right now and it's OK but the image sizes are getting huge).
What are your thoughts on this can could help us see the pros and cons of
this kind of "unmanaged solution" (i.e. doing things in-house)?
Many thanks for your help- I really do appreciate your experience and
knowledge and all answers will be considered.
Paul
This is a great venue- hopeully I can put in what I have been getting out
for some time (while lurking). Here's my situation as far as Xp deployment
goes:
We are merging two schools, and the new addition has around 150 desktops and
two servers that currently run 2000 Professional and Server. On our existing
school site we have around 60 laptops, seven servers, 60 admin systems (for
school management systems) and 250 desktops. We have been moving our current
equipment to XP Pro and Server 2003 (slowly though) with the help of a
management system for schools that kind of comes with a "prefab"
configuration and than costs a huge amount of money to keep happy.
Here's what we are considering: We are thinking of running the new site as a
kind of test bed for running things "in house" without an external management
solutions. This would involve dekstop deployment ourselves (we want to use a
basic RIS push out which would include within the unattend.txt file our
volume license code for XP); MSI installation of Office 2003; and Group
Polocies to lock down the dekstops without stopping the students from
experiencing something of a real network environment. We would of course move
the servers over to 2003 SP1.
Question: Would this work well? Remember that we are in a school environment
where students range from the not-so-IT-literate to the extreme hacker. Also
imagine that the LAN will seriously expand in size over the next four months
by around 200 machines. And this is why we thought of RIS (we use SysPrep
right now and it's OK but the image sizes are getting huge).
What are your thoughts on this can could help us see the pros and cons of
this kind of "unmanaged solution" (i.e. doing things in-house)?
Many thanks for your help- I really do appreciate your experience and
knowledge and all answers will be considered.
Paul