Nothing remarkable in this session, mostly just the same as last year: use WinPE, script everything to make it reliable and repeatable, use the tools available. Something I hadn’t seen before was the BDD , a toolkit for accelerated desktop deployment. Looks nifty, but probably needs some work when deploying Windows 2000 and Office 2000.

After that, Windows Audit Collection Services. This is a not yet released product for collecting security event logs from servers and workstations into a central SQL database. Looks pretty cool, has some amazing volume capabilties (>20,000 events collected/second, assuming the database can handle inserts that fast), uses encryption and compression for streaming events over the wire, allows filtering with WMI Query Language, uses single instance store in the database for repeated items via normalization, etc. Now, the downside: release date is ‘to be determined’, license is ‘to be determined’. So, will the average operation need to pay for it? I would certainly hope not. It comes with MSDE as the store by default, so that *might* be a good sign.