The company that I work for has staffed me on a project in Austin. While I cannot go into detail about what the project entails I can discuss some of the cool toys I get to work with. The best thing about being staffed on this project is that the location is on the South side of Austin and I live on the North East side of San Antonio. It’s just a strait 1 hour drive to and from work. So, instead of leaving home on Monday and not being back until Thursday night, I’m home every night. The drive is actually an easy drive and I do stay in Austin on Thursday nights and sometimes Mondays. We can leave after 12:00 noon on Friday so there’s no point in me driving an hour to work only 4 hours…. Now, on to the toys.
FLEXNet Studio is a Macrovision product that stands out the most to me. My task on the project is to repackage applications to get them ready for Active Directory and SMS to push them out to the clients. Thankfully all the clients are Ghost Images so uniformity is a Godsend. Using this tool, I load up a virtual pc image, take a “before” snapshot of the computer, install the application, and take an “after” snapshot. Once I’m done with that the program will list any and all differences found on the pc; folders, ini files, shortcuts, registry entries/changes, etc. I can then build an MSI off of the changes made to the system. Is it legal? Yes. I wouldn’t be doing it if it wasn’t. A very cool toy indeed. To bad the price starts at $1700 for the standard license!
Ghost is another cool toy that I’ve been getting to play around with. Many of you are probably saying, “Ghost, whoop-ti-do!” Well guess what, I’ve never used it before. Ghost is a great tool to create an image of our system. The uses of Ghost are almost endless and it has been another Godsend for me. When testing my repackaged applications, Ghost lets me refresh the machine back to the initial state in less than 20 minutes! God bless the man who invented Ghost. Along with Ghost is BartPE. My knowledge of this is still very limited but I like the idea of booting up a box from the CD and interactively ghosting a machine. There’s a lot more to it but I haven’t played around with it too much just yet.