Sharing a great experience and learning from a customer engagement this past week.   The customer thought they had only a few Intel vPro systems in their environment, and we were collaborating on getting the vPro provisioning process running.

During the discussion, I encouraged the customer to enable OOB Discovery.  This very light process provides an overview picture of vpro\amt systems in an environment. OOB Discovery runs a small script using the existing Altiris agent, and makes ~8 data point updates on the client object in the Symantec\Altiris database.

The customer thought only 20 vpro system were in the environment. After enabling OOB Discovery, I received the following note – “[Enabled] the OOB Discovery package and now realize we have a lot more machines that are vPro compatible than I would have thought (about 650 last I checked)… I honestly had no idea we were purchasing all of our [systems] with vPro”

...

I needed to find a way to set the default printer via a Deployment Console job. I have found a few different ways of doing it.

The first is a vbs script:

Set WSHNetwork = CreateObject("WScript.Network")
WSHNetwork.SetDefaultPrinter "[PRINTER_NAME]"

For more info check out this web site: http://www.intelliadmin.com/blog/2007/08/set-defau...

The second can be used in the command prompt:

start /W RUNDLL32 PRINTUI.DLL,PrintUIEntry /y /n "[Printer_Name]"

For more information check out this web site: http://www.robvanderwoude.com/2kprintcontrol.php

You can even enter in the server location for a printer,...

In the July 25th, 2009 CompTIA SmartBrief newsletter [comptia@smartbrief.com]was the following blub:

       Data centers the next target for RFID
       RFID technology is seen by many in the financial services industry as a solution
       for Sarbanes-Oxley regulatory compliance, allowing firms to accurately and easily
       keep tabs on assets, and a group called the Financial Services Tech Consortium 
        has been assembled to develop standards for RFID-based IT asset tracking. 
        According to the group, the technology has helped Bank of America trim its time
        spent on inventory by 90%, followed by Wells Fargo and Chase at about 78% each. 
 ...

Apart from Symantec products and processes, why can not we have ideas that can change the way we do things.

I have got an idea here that is going to save lot of time and money for our organization.

According to Microsoft the design goals for Windows XP on a typical consumer PC are:

• Boot to a useable state in a total of 30 seconds
• Resume from Hibernate (S4) in a total of 20 seconds
• Resume from Standby (S3) in a total of 5 seconds

I work for an organization which has over 1000 employees. Most of the employees are complaining about the time that a laptop/desktop is taking to boot to Windows. We are also concerned on the same. We had a meeting today and discussed about the new and ongoing issues in our company that are affecting the business. One of our discussion topics is, how to bring down the bootime and how to increase the performance?

We have a standard Environment:

• Laptop/Desktop [Dell/HP]:
• ...