It makes good sense to have a firm grip on the configuration of the software installed on your users PCs. It also makes sense to standardize these configurations, or else you'll end up with a heterogeneous computer base to troubleshoot, which is a major headache. But at the time (that was 5 years ago), there weren't so many tools to do automated stuff, so we did most of it manually. So while we were at it and installing Windows 95, MS-Office, McAfee antivirus, Acrobat Reader, Internet Explorer, legacy software and so on, we took great care to configure it properly at the same time, in order to ease up our lives a little. We knew that in Office, for example, the clipart is installed only on the first instance you want to access it, after the installation of Office itself. So you had to go in PowerPoint, start a blank presentation, and click on the Clipart button to launch the clipart installation procedure. If at this point, you clicked "Cancel", this screen wouldn't appear anymore, and you had to so all sorts of things to get it properly installed afterwards. So that meant we had to do it now, so users won't call afterwards about ClipArt not functioning. Another benefit from standardized configurations was that I had a better control on what was going on with the machines (see "Virus protection in a Microsoft Windows network, or How to stand a chance"). Or let's say that people from the other city (from your department) is in town and uses one of the computers here, they will face an environment similar to theirs (since it's standard), so less chances that they'll open a problem call.
We also used one of these tools that let's you copy a hard drive byte-by-byte aver the network (but the disks, or sometimes the whole machines, have to be identical), and these saved us a lot of time, because we only had to configure one machine (I should say one of each model) and clone it over the network. We still had to go around and reconfigure the machines after the installation was complete (we were using static IP at the time, so we had to put back the proper IP address in each machine). Note that with NT machines, you need another tool to change the SIDs of your machines, or else all your machines will think they are all the same. When it came to upgrade a single piece of software on existing machines, however, it was still the good old fashioned way: with the CD or over the network, and go on each machine individually.
The hours were long sometimes, but in the long run it paid off because we knew everything that was installed on our computer base, which means more stable machines, i.e. less work. Aaahh, do I miss these long lunches and these afternoons at the movies...:-)
1. Introduction
3. The bad...
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