It appears astho MS has now decided that they dont like all of the 3rd party products for doing unattended installs so now they release there own free product (Registration Required). So far it looks pritty complete too.

Microsoft Desktop Deployment Center

Has anyone else had a chance to look at this and found any problems?

Is this a software program or a web site cuase all i have founf is a web site

???

any info would be appreciated

If you click on the "Microsoft Solution Accelerator for Business Desktop Deployment " link on the site you can download 2 different applications the smaller of the two basicly lets you make a full unattended install. I havent finished downloading the second one yet.

any special in this?

thanx for the info will test it later today

I have been moderately surprised for some time that no one seems to notice when Microsoft does something so very right as the release of the latest BDD Solution Accelerator Standard & Enterprise Editions. These toolsets are the natural progression of the original release approximately a year prior to the release of the latest tools on November 15.

The documentation, the scripts, and the complete unattend build environment is very well designed so that corporations can produce a master desktop image, and automate the entire desktop deployment process.

I have a vested interest in the product having toured the world in the last 3 years training 1000's of Microsoft customers in the tools used in desktop deployment. This particular offering really does go a long way towards providing a complete deployment scenario as well as the tools to craft it.

Technologies used and described in great detail (in no certain order) are:

User State Migration Tool

Windows PE 2004

RIS (to deliver Windows PE)

Sysprep

Unattended setup

Imaging - Ghost, PQIdeploy, SMS OS Deployment

Application Compatibility

Application Packaging

Security

Lite-Touch Deployment (someone has to "kick off" deployment)

Zero-Touch Deployment (uses SMS 2003 to deploy XP w/o direct user intervention)

Zero-Touch Provisioning (large enterprises use these tools to provision users & computers - best implemented as moving otherwise admin tasks to the user for self-provisioning)

I actually sent in an announcement of the toolset as a news article for the front page, but it wasn't deemed by the moderators as worthy of the front page, but...

Give it a thorough look - one of its best features is that it does encapsulate best practices as well as a well tested solution that can be installed and used almost w/o customization.

XPAdddict