Layers Saved the Day

I work at a two year College. Before every semester I reimage all of the computers the students will be using. This semester I decided to jump feet first into software virtualization. That's right, almost every piece of software on the computer into a virtual layer. We are talking between 15 and 25 layers.

I wanted to move as much software as I could to layers for many reasons. The biggest was to eventually move everyone over to SVS Pro. I figured that if I knew the layers worked that I knew that they would stream.

On the first day of school I started to get very frantic calls. People from all over campus complained that when they double clicked on a Word document OpenOffice opened. After some quick checking I determined that I did not make my OpenOffice layer correctly. It was set as the default document software on the computer.

I quickly created a script that would turn the layer off. Eventually I created a job in Deployment Console that deactivated the layer and deleted it.

If OpenOffice was not in a layer I would have been stuck in a difficult situation. It took me about 15 minutes to get everything thrown together. If OpenOffice was not in a layer, who knows how long it would have taken me to get things going.

Thanks SVS!