Any Advice?

[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

 

[Ravi]

"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)?"

Unmanaged solution is perfectly fine and you can actually put your own
creativity and make it more solid. In fact, it is suggested because
services companies these days charge huge amount for managing simple
things that we can automated.

You can put in things like ADS - Automated deployment services to
administer all the client machines from a central location. You can run
jobs remotely, push patches by writing small scripts etc. Remember,
This is all one time and proper planning will make your solution solid.

Ravi

 

[WM]

ADS is server only - RIS would probably be a better solution here since they
need something that will work client or server.

 

[Ravi]

Yes. True.
I dint think about it...

 

[Guest]

Thanks for the responses- it looks like I was on the right track. Now I've
just got to do it

Have any of you got some suggestions as to application packagers- for
example, we plan on using MSI files for the Office install, but what about
applications that we can't push out this way (we currently use "Prism Pack"
so may stay with that in any case).

Thanks again people!

Paul