I have known Richard Campbell for some time now and every time we meet up we have the same discussion that I should do a segment for RunAs Radio (Once upon a time it was for .NET Rocks Radio) but we just never seemed to follow up. This week-end we caught up on line and decided that he and his co-host Greg Hughes would interview me on Business Desktop Deployment (BDD 2007), which will go live October 3rd.
RunAs Radio is a great weekly interview if IT Pros for IT Pros, and they really do a good job of highlighting new and upcoming technology.
I was excited to discuss Deployment with them because not only have I been teaching it for the past several months, it is truly a passion for me. I joke that BDD is a form of magic, but according to Arthur C. Clarke "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.'
Business Desktop Deployment is not necessarily new technology, but the chasm between BDD 2.5 and BDD 2007 is impressive in its scope, but more so in how much easier it has become to build a comprehensive deployment solution. In previous iterations of BDD it was inconceivable that in a ninety minute presentation I could create a deployment server, create a build, insert an operating system, applications, drivers and patches as well as actually kicking off my first deployment… but that is exactly what I have been doing at user group meetings across the continent and that is exactly what I will do at my presentation at SMB Nation 2007 in Redmond this week-end.
We discussed the four deployment scenarios (new machine, upgrade, replace machine, refresh machine), and the advantages of both LTI (Light-Touch Implementation) and ZTI (Zero-Touch Implementation), as well as how to mix-and-match these two in an organization. We also discussed the new deployment technologies introduced with Windows Vista that make deployment so much simpler than with previous versions of Windows.
It was a very informative half-hour, and I invite you all to tune in October 3rd at www.runasradio.com to hear the whole conversation. Let me know what you think!