Grinding Gears - Software Repackaging and Deployment for the Windows Platform

What is the rationale upon which a software deployment is built? How does a software packaging engineer qualify a decision to use one method or another for each new task? When should you repackage using a snapshot process, versus making a transform file, versus writing a script? Should you bundle your application into a base operating system image library, or install it on layer 1 or 2 using a task sequence? Or should you deploy it later? How do you quantify the advantages of automation?

What are your options for packaging, testing, and deploying software? What kinds of testing do I need to worry about? What about Group Policy? What about scripting?

In this book I will explore all of these questions and more. I will also dive into some of the more common tools and techniques used to prepare software for mass distribution in an enterprise environment. But what if you only support a dozen computers? No worries, we will explore that end of the range as well.

Scripting, packaging, transforms, updates, upgrades, removals, group policy, MDT and WAIK, Configuration Manager and OSD images and task sequences, and much more. This is the life of a software deployment engineer. Let's see if it's something you'd like to pursue.