For many years I was a principal consultant with Altiris (in the US and EMEA) and when XP was released I oversaw more deployments than had hot dinners. I got deployment burn out and went to work for a smaller IT company to try to gather my thoughts (and get of the IT radar) only to find myself now 6 years later faced with the same scenario I had back then, deploy and stay up with the times (i.e. Windows 7) or potentially go unsupported (XP SP2) – and getting off the IT radar, yeah I’ve only involved myself more…
At any rate, enter the imaging and deployment contenders – all names we’ve heard of before, right? Altiris, Acronis, and SCCM – the big boys. That was until I did a bit of research and came across a product called SmartDeploy from Prowess. From the outside what it seems you do is create a VM and then take an image of that VM, which subsequently makes a .wim file you then deploy, the twist being that it injects the drivers at boot time in it’s own version of WinPE, giving you added flexibility. Pretty cool. There seems to be a scripting environment too, but I haven’t gotten that deep yet…
Altiris as we all know builds images and they do that really well, but their images are akin to trying to kill a mosquito with a cannon ball, they not only want to do imaging, but they also want to do inventory, system management, anti-virus, essentially be the one stop shop, which – don’t get me wrong, one vendor is good for some things, but all your eggs in one basket in this arena…I’m not too sure. Plus, their images are still a big and bulky format – not .wim files – which with today’s hardware means a minimum of two images (an x86 and and x64), not to mention a larger pipe for deployment and more disk space to save these images…
SCCM and the Microsoft deployment tools, they’re great too, but they’re more focused at the big league. To get the most benefit from anything Microsoft you have to be either really good at it and focus 110% of your time and efforts on it, or be an enterprise organisation with an EA SA VL and a few other acronyms, ensuring you get the licensing you need when you need it.
Acronis, personally I’ve never used them but every time I look at their marketing efforts or see them mentioned, it seems they’re focused at helping John Doe make an image of his home PC so in case it breaks he’s got a backup…I could be wrong, but that is what their marketing seems to give me the impression of…
Now, here is where SmartDeploy seems to fit in. From what I can gather their licensing model is based on IT head count that will use the product rather than desktop deployments and their sweet spot is the SME market which other guys tend to leave behind or don’t fully address. Often, I find the SME market seems to include government and schools too, which it seems SmartDeploy have a few case studies on, so I can’t be too far from wrong 
At any rate, over the next few days (ok, weeks) I’m going dust off the deployment gloves and see what Prowess has to offer because we all know that the Windows 7 migration and imaging jobs can’t be avoided too much longer and a new contender to the market is always welcome as is a fresh set of ideas, not to mention yet another alternative to add to my imaging tool belt…
If you’ve used their tool or know any more about it, please let me know too as I’d be interested! Watch this space…
