SmartDeploy by Prowess Now Provides Enterprise Support for Windows 7

GGarza | Nov 22, 2009 | Comments

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My job involves managing a class room involving over 50 computers at a training center. The number may not seem like much but the classroom has classes in XP, Server 2003 Active Directory, Cisco CCNA, A+, Windows 7, Adobe CS4, Server 2008 with Hyper-V, all at the same time! Each host holds a different software product for the class in question. That is, each host runs a virtual machine that holds the training material for the student. For me that makes running the classroom easy because a student can sit at any station and launch his training video. Which brings us to Smart Deploy by Prowess.

As any IT manager is aware, deploying software to a host station can be tricky because of different hardware specs, different a processors, different amounts of RAM, hard drive space, and then there is the setup, activation codes, product keys and the like. It would be so much easier to setup one machine with all of the software ready to go and product activations, and so on and then deploy this image to every system that needs it. Using a virtual machine can make this happen.

Smart Deploy Enterprise allows a comprehensive deployment solution for companies that have multiple software and hardware configurations on site. By this, consider that many companies may have a multitude of software products, like Office 2003 and Office 2007; or have computers with various configurations, 1 gig of RAM or less. Furthermore, they are not in a position to upgrade their hardware, especially in today’s economy. A deployment solution that can save them time, especially to a resource employee constrained IT department can be a useful addition.

SmartDeploy by Prowess

What are the benefits?

For starters, you can reduce the number of images that you need in your image library. You can take advantage of the latest operating systems, where you can upgrade that instead of your entire hardware compendium. You can eliminate complexity, since you are using industry standards and no specialized installation skills are needed. Then there is the fact that you will save time in the deployment. Every image is the same. They can be ported to different locations. The image may also be removed by a new one on the hardware and it can be replaced with a different one, then later you can put the first image back on. Here are some of the deployment operations: