If you are the person in your IT department that is responsible for deploying new desktops and laptops then I highly suggest you get in to imaging. If you are using imaging software currently then great but if you are not then I suggest you get involved and start learning it. For those unaware of what imaging is, it is a method to take a single installed copy of an operating system and copy it to a location in which it can be deployed later to other computers. In the image you can install Microsoft Office, Adobe acrobat, WinZip, Citrix or whatever you think your end users will need. It can totally make you and your fellow technicians more productive. We currently use Altiris Deployment Console 6.9 SP3. I have also used Symantec Ghost in the past. Microsoft has also come a long ways in supplying free resources to do imaging for companies that maybe can't afford to spend big bucks on imaging software.
We were asked to come up with 18 laptops to switch out older laptops/desktops (see photo). We setup the laptops on a single table/desk and 16 - 20 minutes later the image was done installing on all the laptops. So if we did not have imaging then we would have to go to each laptop, install the operating system, download and install drivers, join it to the domain, install software needed such as MS office, Adobe and so on. That process would have taken nearly forever. Yet 20 minutes later 18 laptops are finished and ready to be deployed, or near so.
