The return to work has been unbelievably busy but now that we're a few weeks in I can report on the progress of our Dell XPS-12 rollout.
Firstly, I'm happy that I actually have something to report. Last year I gave Dell something of a hard time for being hapless with their model lineup, delivery of demo machines and poorly communicated information. I'm happy to say they've redeemed themselves with delivery of these machines. The turnaround was roughly 6 weeks between ordering and delivery including imaging by our local reseller. Not bad at all for 80 machines over the Christmas period, particularly when you consider these models are only a couple of months new themselves.
So, delivery was a bit of a win for us. I also have to say that imaging was as well, once we knew what to expect. In having all our machines rolled out with our own software image, we hit a few problems initially (while preparing the master image machine), but it seems the process of duplicating that image was almost identical to Windows 7 machines.
Probably the biggest issue we hit was with getting sysprep to run on the master machine prior to committing it to be duplicated. A word of warning to anyone else needing to do this - whatever you do, don't update the system Metro apps (video, people, news etc.) before sysprepping. We had to start again from scratch after doing this, as it completely breaks sysprep.
Other issues we found were to do with customisations (like customising the Start Screen for users), we found ways around all of them with a bit of Googling, and they translated well into deployment en masse.
So the machines are here and we've handed some of them to teachers. Now we wait to see what the reaction to them, and Windows 8 will be! In the meantime we have to get prepared for the coming year and our new BYOD'ers!
