Windows Deployment Services, WAIK & Windows 7 – Part 3/4
We are back again and in today’s article we will continue our efforts in automating our Windows 7 deployment via Windows Deployment Services utilising the WAIK tool and the creation of our XML Answer files. In Part 2 of this series we focused on the creation of the WDSUnattend.xml file that is required to automate the Windows Pre Execution Boot for our WDS clients and took care of the partitioning of our disks. If you missed part 2 of this series, you can access it here. Today we continue our efforts in utilising the Windows System Image Manager (WSIM) to create our ImageUnattend.xml...
Read MoreWindows Deployment Services, WAIK & Windows 7 – Part 2/4
Welcome back to the second part of this series and in the next 2 article’s I will be focusing our efforts on creating the necessary xml answer files to automate the deployment of our Windows 7 image via Windows Deployment Services (WDS). In part 1, I provided you with step by step instructions on installing and configuring your WDS role on your Windows 2008 R2 machine. If you missed it, you can access part 1 here. Our focus in today’s article revolves around the creation of the WDSUnattend.xml file that is required to automate the Windows Pre Execution Boot for WDS...
Read MoreWindows Deployment Services, WAIK & Windows 7 – Part 1/4
I have been known to be at the cutting edge of technology, early adoption of Microsoft technologies is a must and this time round nothing is going to change. I first played with Windows Deployment Services (WDS) back in the day when it was referred to as Remote Installation Services (RIS) and had first exposure to the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK) back when it was in beta and so was Vista at the time. I took the plunge and deployed Windows Vista using Light Touch deployment via WDS and the WAIK a month after Vista was released to the enterprise and today I will be providing...
Read MoreIntroducing your first Windows 2008 R2 Domain Controller
Windows 2008 R2 has only been out for over a week however I have decided to introduce my first Windows 2008 R2 domain controller (DC) almost immediately into an existing Windows 2008 Active Directory (AD) Domain to eventually have a complete R2 forest functional level to benefit from some of the new R2 features. For a seasoned IT Pro, introducing new domain controllers is fairly straightforward, however I have decided to provide you with a step by step guide on doing so and the pre-work that is required, so let’s begin! Now before we delve into the step by step guide I thought I would...
Read MoreStream media from your SharePoint Site with Windows 2008 Media Services
Wouldn’t it be great if you could deliver digital media content including Windows Media Audio (WMA) and Windows Media Video (WMV) from your SharePoint site without buffering issues and poor viewing experience. We must admit that SharePoint itself isn’t great in handling and storing digital media in particular large Video files and we can blame SQL for that! Even though you can host WMV’s in document libraries just like any other file, features such as fast streaming capabilities effectively eliminating buffering time, and reducing the likelihood of playback interruptions due to...
Read MoreBring a web application closer to the desktop via Prism
Although not necessarily a blog topic of choice I couldn’t resist myself to not introduce Mozilla’s Firefox latest extension for “Prism”. This little add-on allows you to convert a website to a desktop application in a matter of a couple of clicks. The web applications that immediately came to mind included Google Apps, Facebook and YouTube. So I went ahead, downloaded the add-on from here and installed it on my Firefox browser (currently running Firefox 3.5b4 on my MAC OS X). From here it’s pretty straight forward, you browse to the site you want to convert as a...
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