Deployment Solution

During the last three years I've posted a lot of articles on what was first the Juice and is now Symantec Connect. I wanted to look back on all these articles and what they gave me as a technical writer and specialist. I will give you the links to all the articles, but I also wanted to make article 100 a special gift to the community.

In June 2006 I went to an event that was arranged by Altiris. At that time I was working as a technical specialist for a governmental institute in the Netherlands. In my job I was responsible for application maintenance and was head of the team. It was made up of 14 people who managed applications, packaged applications and tested them for a 1000+ Citrix environment. During the event Altiris demonstrated SVS and somehow it intrigued me. That could be a huge solution for lots of the problems we encountered. But it was not working on Citrix. It took me several weeks before I understood why and I solved it.

We started using it and we loved it, but we were not able to buy licenses because Altiris did not support it. That was solved by a gift of enough licenses to do the job and together with that we bought a few Wise Packaging Studio licenses.

A few months later we had to reimage over 500 computers and a company offered to do it, but it was very expensive. As usual I thought, let's do it yourselves. I had over 6 years experience in Altiris Deployment Solution.

So we bought 800 Deployment Solution licenses and we did the complete migration in less then 14 hours.

It was a huge success.

During this time I also found out that there was a website for SVS enthusiasts: juice.altiris.com.

I became a member and I started contributing. First it only covered SVS, but during the years more and more of the Altiris portfolio came to it.

Juice was a great website and lots of contributors helped the site to become a single place to learn all about Altiris. And yes, you were getting points for submitting and these points could be traded in for goodies.

After Symantec bought Altiris the Juice disappeared and it became www.symantec.com/connect.

In the beginning I missed Juice a lot. What happened to our community where we posted good stuff and good articles? What about Talk Like a Pirate Day?

Now after months I've gotten used to Connect and it is becoming better every week. Problems are solved, people helped a lot to make it possible to do what we wanted to do.

My special thanks goes out to: Ohzone
MBmillecam
Juicemaster
and Leslie Miller.

During all these years I have posted articles in Dutch, English and French. In this article I will only give the links to the English articles.

1. SVS in Practice in a Company with More Than 500 Users
2. Use SVS on Terminal Servers with DeltaISIS
3. Leveraging Virtualization... Erik's Way
4. DVS4SBC and Profile Management
5. Packaging Large, Larger, the Largest Applications!
6. Altiris Deployment Solution for HP Thin Clients
7. Adobe CS 3 Packaging
8. HP Rapid Deployment Pack in Action
9. The Many Faces of Virtualization
10. Software Virtualization Enters the Mainstream
11. Setting File Permissions Inside SVS Layers
12. Packaging Internet Explorer 8
13. Welcome to Las Vegas
14. Deploying Vista SP1 or Not. That is the Question!
15. Troubleshooting Virtual Software Packages
16. Handling Office 2007 License Keys with SVS
17. SVS Packaging Best Practices
18. SVS Packaging Best Practices, Part 2: Packaging Daemon Tools
19. SVS Packaging Best Practices, Part 3: Update Existing Layer
20. SVS Packaging Best Practices, Part 4: Exclusions
21. SVS Best Practices, Part 5: Restoring a Crashed PC
22. Configuring Default Machines for Packaging
23. Building a VSA of Windows Live Beta
24. Using AppStream to Deploy Packages on Demand for Your Offsite Users, Part 1
25. Using AppStream to Deploy Packages on Demand for Your Offsite Users, Part 2
26. Using AppStream to Deploy Packages on Demand for Your Offline Users, Part 3
27. Everything You Always Wanted to Know About SVS but Were Afraid to Ask
28. Uninstall Software Using Altiris Deployment Solution
29. Sysprep Script for Automatic Deployment XP and Win2003
30. How to Synchronise Your PXE Over Various Servers in Other Locations
31. Hardware Detection Without Using HII
32. Uninstall Office 2003 and Install Office 2007
33. How To: Create Your Own Bootable ESX 3i USB Stick
34. Building a VMware Shared Disk
35. SWV Wow, What a Great Improvement!
36. Deployment Console
37. Deployment Console, Part 1: The Way You Should Implement It
38. Deployment Console, Part 2: Installing Deployment Solution 6.9 on Our Home Site and on Other Sites.
39. Deployment Console, Part 3: Configure Your Multisite PXE Environment
40. Deployment Console, Part 4: Configuring Microsoft DFS for Deployment Server File Synchronisation
41. Deployment Console, Part 5: Install HII Tools and Configure Them for a Multi Site Environment
42. Deployment Console, Part 6: Automating Tasks to Build the Coolest Deployment Solution
43. Deployment Console, Part 7: Building a Clean, Lean Windows XP Machine and Deploy it with Altiris Deployment Solution
44. Deployment Console, Part 8: Building a Clean, Lean Windows XP Machine with DS
45. Deployment Console, Part 9: The Ultimate DS 6.9 HII .bin
46. Error 18 in SVS Explained, and a Workaround
47. Wise Package Studio for Beginners
48. Wise Package Studio, Part 1: Installing and Configuring Wise Package Studio 7
49. Wise Package Studio, Part 2: Building Your First Package
50. Wise Package Studio, Part 3: Windows Installer Editor
51. Wise Package Studio, Part 4: Start Guide for the Virtual Package Editor
52. Wise Package Studio, Part 5: Package Dot NET Framework 2.0
53. Wise Package Studio, Part 6: Building an XP Client Packaging Machine
54. Wise Package Studio, Part 7: Use Install Tailor to Create a Transform File
55. Wise Package Studio, Part 8: Building an Office 2003 Generic Transform File
56. Wise Package Studio, Part 9: Packaging the WAIK - Windows Automated Installation Kit
57. Wise Package Studio, Part 10: Orca, What is It and Why Do We Need It?
58. Wise Package Studio, Part 11: Testing Our Packages
59. Using Workflow as a Self Service Point for Your Users!
60. Workflow as a Self Service Point for Your Users, Part 2: Installing the Notification Server for Workflow Authentication
61. Workflow as a Self Service Point for Your Users, Part 3: Installing Workflow Solution
62. Workflow as a Self Service Point for Your Users, Part 4: Installing and Configuring Altiris Workflow Designer
63. Symantec Workspace Virtualization at a Quick Glance
64. How Symantec Workspace Virtualisation Can Help Reduce Your Carbon Footprint
65. Symantec Endpoint Virtualisation Almost Open for Customers! Read the First Review
66. Pitfalls of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure
67. How to Convert Vmware Windows XP IDE Disk to LSILogic SCSI
68. It's All About Sysprep
69. It's All About Sysprep, Part 2
70. It's All About Sysprep, Part 3
71. Deep Intro to VMware ESX, Part 1
72. Deep Intro to VMware ESX, Part 2
73. Deep Intro to VMware ESX, Part 3
74. Deep intro to VMware ESX, Part 4
75. Deep Intro to VMware ESX, Part 5
76. Deep Intro to VMware ESX, Part 6: VMware Tools
77. Deep Intro to VMware, Part 1
78. Deep Intro to Vmware, Part 2: Virtual Center
79. Deep Intro to VMware, Part 3: Virtual Infrastructure Client
80. Deep Intro to VMware, Part 4: Cloning
81. Deep Intro to VMware, Part 5: VMware View
82. Deep Intro to VMware, Part 6: VMware View Agent and Client
83. Deep Intro to VMware, Part 7: VMware Converter
84. Deep Intro to VMware, Part 8: Snapshot
85. Deep Intro to VMware, Part 9: Protect Your Virtual Disks From Deletion
86. Create Your Own ESXi 4 Bootable USB Stick

Over 86 articles written in English that (I hope) helped a lot of people to do their work better or easier.

I have gotten a lot of responses, was asked to speak at packaging and virtualisation conventions and events, packaged software for companies all over the world, and still I'm doing a lot of work that came to me by Connect.

I received several thousand emails from members asking me questions, telling me that I made small mistakes that could be solved easier and from members that just wanted to ask me non-technical stuff.

In Las vegas, Malta and other places I have met several of the other Connect members, and I'm doing business with several members.

Yes, Juice and now Connect are the place to be to find Altiris and Symantec related questions, answers etc.

And I'm planning to go further with the next 100 articles.

But before that I first need to post article 100. And that should be a special one.

Now I'm ready for holiday and a few conferences (Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, Cincinnati and Francisco) in the states.

Have a good holiday for all that are ready to go and for every body that is already back, keep things going.