At the Cleveland user group meeting Hugo Parra the PM for Deployment Solution presented the roadmap for DS. DS 6.X will continue to get changes and support, DS 6.9 SP4 will be released in Q2 2010 including hardware updates, OS Updates, and any fixes to priority defects DS 7.X Roadmap 7.0 is currently out there Limited functionality Not a point solution 7.1 (Code named Avalon) December release Will help out in the following questions:

1. DS Servers need to share data and keep in sync'ed
2. Make it easier to manage images and software packages to get to the locations where they are needed
3. Better security roles, more granular, global scoping
4. Provide job status and reports, what machines have pending jobs, how long have they been waiting for a job, which jobs failed/succeeded/etc
5. Smarter jobs with better branch logic, more reusability
6. Dynamic groups and filters
7. Make P2V and V2p transformations more fluid, provide advanced deployment capabilities of virtual machines

Based on the NS 7 (Symantec Management Platform) console, complete integration

PXE support

Will be brought back into DS

A site server will have the option to have the PXE Server service installed on it

PXE updates will occur through the Altiris NS agent

Server Support will be back into DS

Able to do a bare metal build of a server

Single Database, the Symantec_CMDB

No longer use the AClient or DAgent

Everything will run though the NS Agent and the DS Plug-in

DS Portal page

"Home" page for working within DS 7.1

Built on Silverlight

Drag and drop ability within the console

Can Drag jobs to computers, computers to jobs

7.2 (Codenamed Everest) July 2010 release MAC support Thin client support (completely on par with DS 6.9) Saw a demo of DS 7.1 and it looked really really cool, the DS Portal built on Silverlight was very fast and responsive, liked the drag and drop capability Would love to hear your thoughts