Exodus Maneuver

Something which is pretty important to me is how desktop delivery is achieved. 

To the end user there is nothing more important than their desktop.  Without this no other services will work. 

Getting desktop delivery right is or should be our wholemeal bread and organic butter.

Vista bought about the revelation that is Windows Deployment Services, effectively killing the little used Remote Installation Services (RIS).  To be fair RIS is pretty clunky and was really showing its age, however was really effective in what it did.  Couple this with Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) and Windows Automatic Installation Kit (WAIK) and you have a realy powerful and above all usable deployment system.

Yes I know you can then add SCCM or SMS as it was into this mix to provide zero touch installs but really, who has the time ;)

All these tools are freely downloadable from Microsoft.

Ok so now you have a super slick way of building machines and you might have even investigated the very cool mehtod of driver injection/store to support various machines on one build.

One day a user come to you with an issue, it is clear that "Windows Rot" has set in, nothing short of a format c:\ and a rebuild will fix it.  So you locate a USB disk and copy all the "important/business critical" photos, music and other niff-naff from the C: drive - maybe you even have folder redirection to reduce this (a bit).

Luckily you are using "some" application virtualisation so the amount of locally installed software is compartively low however despite your best efforts this will never be zero.

Rebuilding that machine is completed and the data/applications and configuration is manually copied/installed or configured.

The user is likely to be without their laptop/desktop for a day maybe two.  Often knowledge of this "time without PC" (TWPC) puts the support team, or even the end user off using a rebuild as a viable option for fixing an issue - often called "Scorched Earth" policy, this will almost certainly result in time spent in a fruitless attempts to avoid the inevitable, or worse still the user "puts up and shuts up".

Having convinced the user that a rebuild is the only way you slave for hours meticulously recording data off the PC, rebuilding and then checking the data back on to the fresh build. 

Finally, bloody and sweating you hand the laptop/desktop back to the user only to hear not five minutes later that a valued/business critical piece of data has failed to make it through the PC->USB->PC process.

Ultimately the vast majority of the time (and mistakes) taken in a rebuild is due to the manual processes required.

Microsoft know this and have provided a pretty cool tool called USMT or in normal people talk, User State Migration Toolkit.

This is an xml (you can configure this is you are crazy enough) driven "business critical wedding photos" data copying machine.  Yes out of the box it does printers, office custom dictionarys, outlook nickname files and anything with a well known file extension.  And a whole host more.

Usage is pretty simple.  If you've already gone through the learning MDT/WDS and WAIK you pretty much know all there is to know about USMT too.

Where things get really cool is when you are using Windows 7.  Here USMT cuts down on the time to copy the user data by not copying the data at all!  Instead USMT 4 kicks in - USMT 3 is used for Vista, and uses hard links rather than shifting the actual data.  Very smart.

Take this one step further and use USMT and a refresh build rather than a replace build and you don't have to install applications either, the OS is just refreshed!

Finally "Windows Rot" is fixable (even avoidable?) and a "Scorched Earth" policy are practical and indeed you could encourage your users to rebuild more often as a matter of course to avoid issues rather than as a last resort.