Hey guys,

I work for a medium size company that has 800 PCs in 15 physical locations. I have to come up with an OS (and initial applications) deployment strategy that would allow us to manage our highly heterogeneous computers.

Right now, we're using ghost images but it's becoming rapidly unmanageable. So I've narrowed our options down to Unattended Installs and RIS installation. I'm having a hard time figuring what is possible with these 2 approaches and what are the limitations.

Is there any kind of Microsoft classes (or any book) that I could take to become an expert in those two technologies. I figure the Windows XP class and the Windows 2003 class both cover these topics, but I would really like to go deep in details.

If anyone has any suggestions for a class, reading, or any other inputs, it would be greatly appreciated.

I can recommend one book i know of - Mastering Windows 2003 Server from Mark Minasi - he covers unattended installs and RIS quite thoroughly. Great book overall.

Mastering Windows 2003 Server

Unattended tutorial on this site

if nothing else, it's heavily detailed in the deployment documentation on both the Microsoft site and included on deploy.cab on the CD.

There are a few books that give glimpses of Unattended installs....

Windows XP Registry

Windows XP Installation

Both give glimpses but only go into automating the Windows install itself, with nothing really on adding applications.