Daniel!
Howdy and welcome to Microsoft Windows! I hope that things go well for you.
Please listen and understand, though, that things are going to be very
frustrating for you along your journey. Things will finally become more and
more clear for you. But that takes time. And that precious thing called
experience. Some people might call it making a ton of mistakes! Hopefully
you will avoid the majority of those mistakes by posting questions in these
newsgroups. I would also S _T_R_O_N_G_L_Y suggest that you go to the
WIN2000.Active_Directory newsgroup as well. Both will be big helps to you.
Anyway, to your questions.
There are actually several answers to your questions. I will try to keep
the number of answers to a minimum as you might become overwhelmed with all
of the possibilities. I will try to keep it all very basic ( remember the
first day of Business School - you learned how to K-I-S-S.... ).
One possibility is to use RIS, or Remote Installation Services. This is
available on WIN2000 and WIN2003 and requires Active Directory, DNS and
DHCP. You would create an image ( usually the i386 folder ) to a shared
folder on the server and then create a RIS Boot Disk. Once you have this
you go to the problem computer, stick in the RIS Boot Disk and reboot.
WIN2000 Pro or WIN XP Pro will be installed on the system. Now, this does
not take care of the deployment of Applications. We will look at that in a
second.
One of the possible limitations of RIS is that there are a limited number of
NICs that RIS supports. Another is that the computer acount will be created
in the default COMPUTERS container. Why is this a problem? The deployment
of applications via GPOs. We will touch on this later. This can be changed
by pre-staging the computer account ( in WIN2000 ) or changing the default
location of the computers ( in WIN2003 ).
One of the major advantages - over the network boot disk - is that you do
not first have to format the hard drive of the workstation. RIS takes care
of that for you....
Another possibility is to use a network boot disk. I really like BART's
Boot Disk. He has a 'modular' boot disk that is really neat. You can
visit his site at
http://www.nu2.nu. Patrick over at
http://sourceforge.net/index.php has another boot disk that looks really
neat. It is more Linux based. With a network boot disk you need to have
the 'source' available. This, again, would be in the form of copying over
the i386 folder to a shared folder on a network server. You can even
include the default location of the computer account object with this method
without having to do any of the pre-staging things. Kinda neat.
One of the disadvantages, though, is that you need to have a clean hard
drive. So, you would need to format the hard drive disk first.
You can also use the 'default' CD-ROM Media with a floppy disk that holds
the winnt.sif file ( or the answer file ). All you do is simply create the
winnt.sif file, put it on a floppy disk, drop in the CD-ROM Media in the
CD-ROM Drive and reboot ( just make sure that it is set to boot from the CD
before the HDD ).
Another possibility is to create a bootable CD-ROM that has the OS and some
other applications so that your need to manually install things after this
is minimized.
One of the nice things about these is that you can slipstream the Service
Pack. So, for example, if you are still using WIN2000 you could create an
image ( again, simply copying the I386 folder to a shared network
folder.....well, simply put ) and then 'slipstream' SP4 to it. So, when you
use this image the computer is going to have WIN2000 SP4 installed. This
saves you the time of having to later install the Service Pack. You can
also, through the use of QChain, install a lot of the Critical Updates.....
All of these possible solutions require that you have some sort of 'answer
file'. This answer file give the installation all of the 'answers' to the
'questions' that are asked during a normal installation of WIN2000 or WINXP
Pro. They are really neat. And very flexible.
Then there is always the 'imaging software' - such as Ghost and Drive Image.
I will not speak too much about these other than to say that if you are
going to use them then you need to know about sysprep.
I like RIS and /or the network bootable disk solutions.
You can install a lot of software via Group Policy. MS Office 2000, Office
XP and Office 2003 are perfect candidates for this. This is a whole other
part of Active Directory. For the Office Applications you would need what
is called an 'Administrative Installation' - which you perform via the
setup.exe /a switch. You would then 'install' it to a shared folder on a
server. You can also install non-MS software via Group Policy. The key here
is that there is an .msi file. If you do not have an .msi file then you can
not use Group Policy to deploy the software. But, you can create an .msi
file. Or .zap file.
For Office you can include a transforms file, or .mst file. This allows you
to have multiple Office installations. For example, the people in
Accounting get Outlook, Word and Excel while the people in Finance get
Outlook, Word, Excel and Access. Naturally, the people in Sales do not need
Access so they get PowerPoint instead!
Another very important fact is that when you are creating the packages for
deployment you have to tell AD where the .msi file is ( for example, in
Office 2000 it is data1.msi ). You must use the UNC naming convention (
\\servername\sharename ) when doing this. That is to say that you can not
use any mapped network drive ( T:\office 2000\Office\data\data1.msi ) as the
install will fail.
Daniel, as you can see there are a lot of possibilities. 45 users is very
small. Once you get everything automated your life will be very easy. One
of the wonderful things about deployment of applications via GPO is that
these applications will 'self-heal'. Say one of your users deletes the
WinWord.exe file on his computer. Well, normally MS Word is not going to
work. If Office was deployed via Group Policy there will be no problem (
assuming that the user or computer account object is still in the OU to
which the GPO was linked - aka still falls under the scope of management ).
It is also rather easy to simply 'Service Pack' an application that you have
deployed via GPO. Say you have Office XP. Well, Service Pack 3 is the
latest and greatest. All you need to do is to 'update' the Administrative
Installation Point ( AIP ) and then redeploy the application ( which is as
simple as clicking on one thing ). You can also update the application to
the next version. So, say that your people want to standardize on Office
2003. Simply create another AIP and when you are creating the package just
tell it that you are 'updating' the Office XP GPO. Office XP will be
removed and Office 2003 will be deployed. It is that easy. Well, at least
on paper! I have done it several times.
HTH,
Cary
Gives you a