At my current company I started as a contractor that was given pretty free reign to evaluate the state of things and design and prototype solutions to improve the environment.
Thinking back these are some of the things I found and worked on:
Windows Imaging (Adding support for Windows 7 and beyond):
When I got there they were using Windows XP primarily and deploying these year after year re-sysprepp'd thick images using Altiris Imaging tools (Symantec Ghost+).
Solution:
I brought in Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2012 with all of my knowledge from my previous employer plus some additional research. Our MDT solution is really well built now and easy to maintain. All Reference (Gold) images are 100% automated, super clean, and can be updated by nearly anyone on the team with little instruction. The imaging spans our 73 different divisions with their distributed software deployment servers, custom naming, the works. I've even built my own custom Wizard UI's (without SCCM) to make really lite-touch deployments. Last year I updated to have a One touch In-Place Windows XP to Windows 7 Upgrade/Refresh.
Various HTA's
There were a number of HTA's they used to create dashboards for the sales people that were getting the HTML elements replaced and updated every Quarter and someone had to go and relink all the data, rebuild the formatting, and various other tedious tasks - it was quite a poor use of a technicians time for 10+ hours.
Solution
I modernized the HTA's and have them programmatically loading the data to display from XML documents. The use of the XML allowed us to keep the previous months data available when we roll out new sets of advertising material to the sales team. Also allowed us to create different views for sorting data. The biggest plus was I was able to provide a spreadsheet to the marketing department to fill in that we could quickly evaluate, touchup and then run a script against to generate the XML data for the various HTA's.
Screensaver
The Screensaver is the one that has me a little annoyed today. The original screensaver in use still today - was "developed" by a third party and is a simple picture of our newly re-branded trucks rolling across the screen at various different areas. The Flash screensaver doesn't work if Flash Player is not installed or is broken, or if there happens to be a broken Shockwave player. When I got there they were deploying Flash player and Shockwave Player (way past the end of Shockwave player) to every machine. Because of the old images that were old and reused year after year with more problems installed over top to add support for new models, the Shockwave player seemed to break a lot. The flash animation is not smooth and is quite jagged with v-sync issues, blacks out any 2nd, 3rd, nth monitors and runs in a 4:3 box on the primary monitor.
Solution:
Having the love for programming I set out one night to rebuild the screensaver in Windows Presentation Foundation since that will make use of hardware acceleration and DirectDraw resulting in smooth animations. It also allowed us to deploy a computer and not have to worry about whether flash was installed or not. The advantage I liked the most was being able to use the full aspect ratio of the monitor and have the truck drive across multiple monitors. The screensaver's only requirement was .NET framework 4.0 client profile - which was in the process of being rolled out to the enterprise. I couldn't get the guy I reported to at the time to take action on the screensaver because he was afraid of me taking his job when I got converted from contractor to direct employee.
Screensaver 2:
A project was brought to me by my director where there was a possible major rebranding. Marketing went to a third party again and came back with some "Screensavers" and a Desktop Background. What they sent was four 1600x1200 JPG's all labeled "Screensaver_" + Something. I wasn't sure what I was supposed to make of them since they were all Grayscale images with a few accent colors on logos but the gray scale was really white washed out ... So I have these 4 pictures that were mostly white. Right Screensavers...
Solution:
I stared at these terrible files and emailed back and forth trying to figure out what it was...after getting nothing new...I took the elements of the images given and came up with a way to animate them and create a loop using my existing screensaver template. I tried to keep to their grays but made it darker.
Screensaver 3:
This week I was asked about looking into Screensaver for a new potential rebranding project. I was excited because I thought I was going to be making the screensaver. Find out Corp marketing went to a third party again and the third party this time was going to be building a flash animation and then using some $40 (most likely) software to compile into a screensaver file. They confirmed that it wouldn't change aspect ratio and it wouldn't span monitors, as well as still keep dependencies on a system installed Flash Player.
Solution:
Told my director - he wants me to build the screensaver and is trying to convince the marketing director to let the 3rd party work on design but let me do the actual building of the screensaver.
Kiosks:
The kiosks in use when I was brought in were ghost images that were applied to machines but were less maintained so drivers would need applied to the newer machines manually after build - or they had to select really old machines for Kiosks. Kiosks required a fair amount of technician configuration each time.
Solution:
Created scripts that could be run on my new Windows XP and Windows 7 images that will take a normal build and then apply all the lock downs to any existing accounts (including default user) except the Administrator. Leaving the Administrator account untouched allows technicians to logon work on the machine but all other accounts would get configured in a locked down state. This allowed any machine to become a kiosk and allowed for a better technician experience with less configuration needed. The scripts also would installs other scripts in the system, any other software needed, creation of user accounts, disabling services, installing hotfixes, and setting up auto logon.
Thinking back these are some of the things I found and worked on:
Windows Imaging (Adding support for Windows 7 and beyond):
When I got there they were using Windows XP primarily and deploying these year after year re-sysprepp'd thick images using Altiris Imaging tools (Symantec Ghost+).
Solution:
I brought in Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2012 with all of my knowledge from my previous employer plus some additional research. Our MDT solution is really well built now and easy to maintain. All Reference (Gold) images are 100% automated, super clean, and can be updated by nearly anyone on the team with little instruction. The imaging spans our 73 different divisions with their distributed software deployment servers, custom naming, the works. I've even built my own custom Wizard UI's (without SCCM) to make really lite-touch deployments. Last year I updated to have a One touch In-Place Windows XP to Windows 7 Upgrade/Refresh.
Various HTA's
There were a number of HTA's they used to create dashboards for the sales people that were getting the HTML elements replaced and updated every Quarter and someone had to go and relink all the data, rebuild the formatting, and various other tedious tasks - it was quite a poor use of a technicians time for 10+ hours.
Solution
I modernized the HTA's and have them programmatically loading the data to display from XML documents. The use of the XML allowed us to keep the previous months data available when we roll out new sets of advertising material to the sales team. Also allowed us to create different views for sorting data. The biggest plus was I was able to provide a spreadsheet to the marketing department to fill in that we could quickly evaluate, touchup and then run a script against to generate the XML data for the various HTA's.
Screensaver
The Screensaver is the one that has me a little annoyed today. The original screensaver in use still today - was "developed" by a third party and is a simple picture of our newly re-branded trucks rolling across the screen at various different areas. The Flash screensaver doesn't work if Flash Player is not installed or is broken, or if there happens to be a broken Shockwave player. When I got there they were deploying Flash player and Shockwave Player (way past the end of Shockwave player) to every machine. Because of the old images that were old and reused year after year with more problems installed over top to add support for new models, the Shockwave player seemed to break a lot. The flash animation is not smooth and is quite jagged with v-sync issues, blacks out any 2nd, 3rd, nth monitors and runs in a 4:3 box on the primary monitor.
Solution:
Having the love for programming I set out one night to rebuild the screensaver in Windows Presentation Foundation since that will make use of hardware acceleration and DirectDraw resulting in smooth animations. It also allowed us to deploy a computer and not have to worry about whether flash was installed or not. The advantage I liked the most was being able to use the full aspect ratio of the monitor and have the truck drive across multiple monitors. The screensaver's only requirement was .NET framework 4.0 client profile - which was in the process of being rolled out to the enterprise. I couldn't get the guy I reported to at the time to take action on the screensaver because he was afraid of me taking his job when I got converted from contractor to direct employee.
Screensaver 2:
A project was brought to me by my director where there was a possible major rebranding. Marketing went to a third party again and came back with some "Screensavers" and a Desktop Background. What they sent was four 1600x1200 JPG's all labeled "Screensaver_" + Something. I wasn't sure what I was supposed to make of them since they were all Grayscale images with a few accent colors on logos but the gray scale was really white washed out ... So I have these 4 pictures that were mostly white. Right Screensavers...
Solution:
I stared at these terrible files and emailed back and forth trying to figure out what it was...after getting nothing new...I took the elements of the images given and came up with a way to animate them and create a loop using my existing screensaver template. I tried to keep to their grays but made it darker.
Screensaver 3:
This week I was asked about looking into Screensaver for a new potential rebranding project. I was excited because I thought I was going to be making the screensaver. Find out Corp marketing went to a third party again and the third party this time was going to be building a flash animation and then using some $40 (most likely) software to compile into a screensaver file. They confirmed that it wouldn't change aspect ratio and it wouldn't span monitors, as well as still keep dependencies on a system installed Flash Player.
Solution:
Told my director - he wants me to build the screensaver and is trying to convince the marketing director to let the 3rd party work on design but let me do the actual building of the screensaver.
Kiosks:
The kiosks in use when I was brought in were ghost images that were applied to machines but were less maintained so drivers would need applied to the newer machines manually after build - or they had to select really old machines for Kiosks. Kiosks required a fair amount of technician configuration each time.
Solution:
Created scripts that could be run on my new Windows XP and Windows 7 images that will take a normal build and then apply all the lock downs to any existing accounts (including default user) except the Administrator. Leaving the Administrator account untouched allows technicians to logon work on the machine but all other accounts would get configured in a locked down state. This allowed any machine to become a kiosk and allowed for a better technician experience with less configuration needed. The scripts also would installs other scripts in the system, any other software needed, creation of user accounts, disabling services, installing hotfixes, and setting up auto logon.
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