I recently had the chance to talk to James Osteen, Assistant Director of the City of Miami's IT Department about their Windows Vista deployment.  I thought that many of you could relate to his position and would appreciate his insight into what it takes to keep a major city like Miami up and running. The Windows Blog:  Hi James, ...

Whether you are planning to deploy Windows Vista or already did, it is important that you keep security high on your list and make sure that all of your desktops are secured.  So, how do you know if your desktops have Windows Firewall settings turned off?  What if some desktops do not have Anti-Virus or Anti-Spyware software ...

I'm relaying the following article on behalf of my colleague Shanen Boettcher, General Manager of Windows Product Management for the enterprise.  During Virtualization Briefing Day in January, Shanen posted to give you background on what we're doing to make it simpler and easier to introduce and get the most out of virtualization of Windows ...

We've reached a pivotal moment in time, the release to Web of Windows Vista SP1 on Tuesday and, to complete the picture, today we released Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2008, the latest generation of the Microsoft Solution Accelerators designed to simplify and ease your deployment experience. There are a lot of things to consider when ...

Hello IT Pros! February 27 is a big day.  Windows Server 2008 will be officially launching in Los Angeles with Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, kicking off in just a few hours.  In support of this very important technology milestone as well as the Windows Vista SP1 release, the Microsoft Solution Accelerators Team has just ...

On Wednesday March 5th, Microsoft Technical Fellow Mark Russinovich will be hosting a virtual roundtable session live over the Internet on Windows Vista Deployment and Adoption. Joining Mark on the panel for the roundtable will be independent industry experts and IT Professionals from organizations that have already deployed Windows Vista as well ...

A long, long time ago, before Windows Vista, techies preferred clean installing the latest release of Windows to upgrading. They knew that there was a lingering problem specific to upgrades that never really went away, long after application compatibility and driver issues had been resolved. This frustrating problem was simple: upgrades left ...

As you might have guessed in my last three posts (1, 2, 3), I love Windows deployment. It’s a fun problem to solve: how do you deploy Windows Vista on thousands and even millions of PCs in an efficient yet controlled manner? One way is to use Windows System Image Manager (WSIM) to edit and validate unattend answer files and use the resulting ...

In previous episodes of Dr. Unattend, you learned how Windows Vista's setup can be automated using unattend answer files. You also learned how to create and validate a simple unattend answer file using Windows System Image Manager (WSIM) that pumps support information into the System Control Panel. Now you must be wondering: “This is ...

Have you ever thought to yourself “A simple command line app for setting up my computer to autologon would solve all of the worlds problems”? If so you should probably get help. Some of our beta testers mentioned that they wanted to set up autologon from the command line. And this app does exactly that. ...