Just a quick one to provide people access to the slides from todays OD unplugged session in London.  I can’t share my demo just now but I will record it…here are the slides for OD unplugged.  But also embedded in the post here courtesy of Windows Live and don’t forget to checkout Springboard and the Windows 7 Evaluation I mentioned.

And also here’s the productivity video from my session.

I was just helping someone internally with some deployment stuff and I came across these excellent videos by Richard Smith on MDT and doing Lite touch deployments.  We obviously have an update of the tools but the basics still apply MDT Update 1 is available here and if you want to know more about Windows 7 deployment, check out Springboard.

What do you deploy to your people as part of your corporate standard desktop?  Windows 7 – yep gota have that! Office 2010?  Yep you know you need to moving to it if you want your people to work as efficiently as possible.  MDOP – well obviously you’re going to be using parts of MDOP to get the job done, be it App-V to deploy your line of business app or Med-V to deploy the actual desktop.  Over and above that what more are you packing in?  Is Silverlight in there?  In this post that’s exactly what I propose.  You should be rolling Silverlight as part of your standard practice.

I can already hear the question screaming in over the ether…Why? Why? Why?!

And I can hear the reasons for not doing it too… “it’s another thing to maintain”, “it’ll encourage people to watch x-y-z instead of working”, “we don’t code for Silverlight, none of our own apps use Silverlight”, Actually that’s a good way to answer the why.

“it’s another thing to maintain”

That is a stance that you could take, given how hard other plugins are to manage.  But we’ve thought about it well in advance and there are two very easy ways to do it.  Firstly Windows Update is aware of Silverlight, so your WSUS, SCCM or SMS infrastructure that you’ve already deployed to manage your business is ready to keep your Silverlight clients on the latest version.  Then there’s Windows Intune, when it’s released there’s yet another option for management. 

Secondly Silverlight itself can check for updates and install them, something that’s controllable via group policy.  What’s required for this “self update” option is for the user to have Administrator access to their PC and an Internet connection.

If you have a more tightly controlled environment then option one is probably for you but if you’ve chosen not to do too much in the way of management you’ve got yourself covered with option 2.

“it’ll encourage people to watch x-y-z instead of working”

Really?  I’m not sure there’s a huge amount of merit in the argument for blocking peoples access to specific sites these days.  It might be me, I might not be seeing it, but we don’t block access to iPlayer (or SkyPlayer which uses Silverlight) at Microsoft and I don’t see people watching TV shows all day.  Surely as an IT Pro it’s better to provide the flexibility in case they do come across a business critical site that uses Silverlight – perhaps something using Pivot for really rich BI?

“we don’t code for Silverlight, none of our own apps use Silverlight”

Ahh the famous case of the chicken and the egg.  I’m a firm believer that if you give people the ability to build something they’ll push the envelope and really build SOMETHING.  How much of a difference would it make to your people if your line of business application actually looked the part and was so easy to maintain that the dev guys were able to keep it beating with the pulse of your business and users?  IT Pros should be leading here, providing the tools and capabilities to make things better.  It’s the same reason that I always think it’s best to deploy 64bit over 32bit where possible.  Not because you need it right now, but you might. 

I always remember being forced to deploy another browser plugin because a CBT (Computer Based Training) course was developed that would only run with version 9.55 or later and we were on version 7, in a regulated industry where you need everyone (that was about 10k people) to complete the training in 30 days time it was a painful lesson.

Do you deploy Office?  Well if you do and if you intend to allow people to use Office 2010 Web Apps then you’ll get a much better experience with Silverlight installed as helps with even little things like synchronising files to the web.  The Office deployment guide goes into far more detail:

Silverlight enables a better online experience with Office.com, powers the Office 2010 interactive guides (available with Office 2010), improves the user experience of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, improves the performance of Office Web Companion applications, and helps with the process of uploading Office documents to cloud services.

So all up, if you want the best Office 2010 experience you want to be installing Silverlight and if you don’t you’re going to miss out on some great features – the interactive guides significantly diminish the learning curve for your users!

From the why we move into the how:

How do I deploy Silverlight at work?

As I’ve mentioned a couple of times above, Silverlight is pretty easy to deploy and we’ve done all the heavy lifting for you with the trusty deployment guide.  But to summarise it you can:

• Deploy manually
• Deploy with just WSUS
• Deploy with SCCM and WSUS together
• Use group policy
• Deploy as part of your standard image

The last option isn’t mentioned in the deployment guide, however it’s as simple as installing before you sysprep your image and you can then mange Silverlight using WSUS and Group policy to keep it up to date.  It’s probably best to use this option as a more tactical move if you’re a large organisation.

Resources:

For more information on Windows 7 deployment see Springboard, for more on Silverlight see Silverlight.net for more information on Optimized Desktop see

The Office 2010 Engineering blog posted a great roundup of the tools that you can use to help deploy Office 2010 this week.  It’s a powerful tool set and I honestly can’t see a blocker to deployment that it doesn’t help remove. 

• You don’t know what addins are out there…there’s a tool for that. 
• Don’t know if you VBA code is compatible it 2010…there’s a tool for that. 
• Want it in your standard image…there’s a tool for that. 
• Want to customise what lands on a client…there’s a tool for that. 
• Want help planning deployment…there’s a tool for that. 
• Want someone to get your coffee whilst you deploy Office 2010…you might have to do that yourself!

Microsoft Office 2010 Deployment Tools

Lots of people are looking at how they should go about deploying Windows 7 in their organisation, a few I’ve seen first hand are struggling to understand how to migrate.  One of the major steps in planning your deployment is probably to build a proof of concept to see just how easy it is and just what the pitfalls are in your organisation.  Have you thought about your application compatibility, are you making the most of things by deploying Office at the same time?

Our Springboard Series resources around Building a Proof of Concept came up in meeting the other day and there really is some great stuff in there.

I’ll be back looking at some of the fun around various aspects of a deployment soon, but if you want a specific question answered then post a comment and I’ll try – or if you want to keep your identity secret because you work for a criminal mastermind in his secret-but-very-expensive volcanic layer filled with retro furniture then drop me an email using the form.

One of the hurdles that I’ve personally experienced when trying to move people to the latest version of Office to help them be more productive is that those little tools they rely on – that excel add-in that they bought that’s become a core part of their process – just isn’t known to you, the IT Pro dude that has to take responsibility for it.

You’ve never heard of the thing before and you don’t know who the vendor is and you don’t have the time to do a full background check to make sure it works.  Then you do your deployment and that supery dupery add-in tanks.  Finally you have to roll that persons install back and they stick as a thorn in your side for years and you can’t explain away not having hit your target for 100% deployment.  Familiar?

Well we’ve got you an answer… 

Take a look at the Microsoft Office 2010 – Compatibility Resource Center we’ve got tools for inspecting VBA code and a tool that helps you to findout what Add-ins are actually running in your business.  Cool stuff… oh yeah and a list of Add-ins that have been tested.  Nice stuff.

This isn’t a post about pop icons of the 80s, 90s, 00s and today it’s just that I can’t resist a pun in a headline. It’s time to have a little better look at the WAIK and we’ll start with the zero to hero guide that is the step-by-step guide.

This time I’m going to give you some tips for using the step-by-step deployment guide to get you started. The guide is simple stuff, I’m not going to go through it line by line, but it gets you from install to deployment in a couple of hours. It’s almost all you need if you’ve only got a couple of handfuls of clients to deploy.

I love a virtual environment, so I created 3 VMs to use with the step-by-step (ooh baby) guide:

• Technician
• Reference
• Target

…and on the first, Technician, I installed the WAIK. You could always use physical boxes but where’s the fun? Then I came to the fun – trying to do this in a virtual environment. One of the key steps in this zero to hero guide is that you need to get the answer file you create (the WAIK shows you what to do) onto a removable drive. Why a removable drive? Well Windows 7 setup looks at any removable drives for an answer file to guide it through install.

Removable storage…oo er… that’s a bit tricky in a Virtual PC world. No you can’t even use USB device pass through and use a physical UFD (USB flash drive) since the option to connect a device isn’t available on a VM with no OS, which is what you’ll be using as your Reference PC for a start.

So how do we get that answer file onto removable media in a VM? The answer comes in the form of VFD (virtual floppy disks) and scripts which Ben Armstrong has documented on his blog. One thing is that you’ll also need a .vfd file for your disk…the way I created this was to use Hyper-V manager on a Windows 2008 R2 server (Action > New > Virtual Floppy Disk…) but there are lots of other ways.

All you need to do is:

• Download Ben’s scripts (I used the VB script)
• Open a Command prompt on the machine running Virtual PC
• Use cscript to run the VB script like this
  •  Cscript /vm:”my vm’s name” /action:vfd /floppy:”e:\blank.vfd”
• In your VM you need to format the vfd
• Copy your autounattend.xml to the floppy
• Back in your command prompt
• Disconnect the VFD from the technician VM with
  • Cscript /vm:”my vm’s name” /action:disconnect
• Use the first cscript sample above again, but change to the reference VM
• Make sure you have an ISO for the Windows 7 DVD connected
• Start your reference VM
• Marvel as Windows 7 installs without you having to do anything

If you’re new to deployment you might be thinking something like “I’ve created an answer file now so haven’t I got an automated deployment?” I guess the answer is yeah… but no.

What you’ve got at this stage is an easily repeatable deployment. From now on every time you want to build a Windows 7 machine it will end up with the same stuff on it sure. It won’t have ALL your stuff on it and it’s still really labour intensive. At this point to do your deployment you’d still need a DVD and a USB key, feet (or a good wheely chair) to get between PCs and lots of time. You could stop here if you only needed to hit say 10 or so machines but more than that and you’ll get bored.

TIP: If you’re in the UK, there’s a couple of gotchas with answer files…The code used for UK layouts isn’t en-UK as you might first guess, it’s en-GB (cy-GB for Welsh). If you use en-UK you’re fine automated install will get stuck on the first screen. There’s a second part to this gotcha too, you’ll need to leave Components\WindowsPE\Microsoft-Windows-International-Core-WinPE\UILanguage set to en-US , but don’t worry everything will work out and you’ll have a UK locale everywere.

The rest of step 2 is pretty easy to follow…and so to step 3…

There’s a minor problem in the step-by-step guide here, that you need to fix, or it won’t work…oops! (you get a 0xc000000f error when booting the WinPE disk). Easy to fix though. Work through to the end of step 3 bullet 3 and then go to c:\winpe_x86 or whatever name you used, and copy winpe.wim to the ISO\sources folder and rename it to boot.wim. That’s it, all fixed!

The 5^th bullet in step 4 says to burn the WinPE ISO you create to a CD, kinda obviously you don’t need to do that, you just need to get the ISO file off the VM. A simple way I like to do this (if I don’t have networking available) is to have a USB key inserted into my host PC and just attach it to the technician VM (USB > USB Mass Storage Device) copy the file to the key, then release it and copy it to the host.

Finally mount the ISO from your host onto your reference VM and boot it. Immediately hit SHIFT + ESC then on the black screen, hit DEL, then in the BIOS change the boot order to boot from CD first.  That’s an extra little tip, if you need to boot from a CD or ISO in Virtual PC when you see the progress bar showing the VM loading do the above and you can access it’s BIOS.

That’s it for now, my longest post so far, and more to come.