My iPod is fully loaded with the best of my collection to keep me spurred on, and the Pretenders' tune made me stop and think for a moment.
It's a productionline here at deployment central.
Engineer 1 connects bare-metal hardware and deploys the image from a Microsoft Deployment Toolkit server over the network.
The newly-installed Windows 7 image then calls to to the existing Altiris infrastructure to receive the core applications that have been packaged by the packaging team to silently install.
Engineer 2 and Engineer 3 (hey! that's me!) then take one of Engineer 1's new laptops and configure the installation for the user. This aspect could have been better automated, but this is a pilot and the experiences and issues are being collated by the team and will be reviewed for the larger rollout in 2010.
As you can see, there's 4 roles that I've mentioned so far, but besides this, there's a deployment scheduler and a couple of build developers, a whole tranch of project people, a Sharepoint consultant and 1st, 2nd and 3rd line support that also need to be considered and communicated with.
And all THIS for a couple of hundred PCs? Yup... if you want approval for a full-scale rollout then you need a positive user experience in the pilot and that means investment. Investing upfront and you get a slick rollout. Try and do-it half-hearted and you get a rollout that stutters and dies and three years later you'll still have some "legacy" PCs out there.... somewhere....
