Vista ACT

Exam 70-624 TS: Deploying and Maintaining Windows Vista Client and 2007 Microsoft Office System Desktops

Another doozy of a title, this exam is likely to appeal to IT professionals who work with Vista in all situations (SOHO, SMB, tech support, enterprise, and so forth) and of all stripes (help desk, tech support, IT administration, and so on). As with other exams in the 70-620 through 70-625 Vista sequence, this one’s Preparation Guide follows the old-style format. In short, anybody who deploys or maintains Windows Vista desktops is likely to benefit from studying for and taking this exam, even though its official target audience is candidates with “a minimum of one year of experience managing day-to-day issues with desktop deployments.”

There’s one more incredibly useful nugget inside this prep guide. It reads: “This exam is the Windows Vista version of Exam 74-134: Pre-Installing Microsoft Products and Technologies, [and is] focused on the OEM Pre-Installation Kit (OPK).” Why so? Because you’ll find some great links to study materials for the other exam on its prep page (linked at the head of this paragraph) that don’t appear on the 70-624 exam page.

The prep tools and resources that appear on the 70-624 page include the following:

• Classroom training: Course 5105: Deploying Windows Vista Business Desktops and Course 5058: Deploying Microsoft Office 2007 Professional.
• e-learning offerings: Collection 5058: Deploying 2007 Microsoft Office System Client Products.

The lack of books and complete e-learning coverage explains nicely why the 74-134 page is referenced, and also why it’s a good idea to dig up its study material citations to help you get ready for this exam as well.

Skills measured on the 70-624 exam break down as follows:

• Deploying 2007 MS Office System:
  Configure MS Office settings & components, install 2007 MS Office system, and migrate from earlier MS Office versions.
• Configuring Windows Vista Automated Installation Settings:
  Configure Vista automated install settings, manage Windows Vista catalogs, add device drivers to Vista installs, manage Windows components, and configure and manipulate Windows Imaging Format (WIM) images.
• Deploying Windows Vista:
  Deploy Vista using Lite Touch Installation (LTI) and Zero Touch Installation (ZTI), customize Windows Preinstallation Environment (PE), and troubleshoot deployment issues.
• Using Business Desktop Deployment (BDD) Workbench:
  Install BDD, configure distribution point in BDD 2007 Workbench, create a reference computer image, manage XML files in BDD Workbench, automate 2007 MS Office system installation, and customize and maintain Windows PE in BDD Workbench.
• Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT):
  Install and configure ACT 5, deploy ACT 5 agents, report application compatibility, and fix compatibility issues.
• Managing User State Migration:
  Upgrade user state from XP to Vista, automate user state migration, manage Vista deployments using SMS 2003, determine Operating System Deployment (OSD) prerequisites, install and configure SMS 2003 OSD Feature Pack, and troubleshoot and plan for user state migrations.

There’s a lot more to this exam than the title conveys, especially where automation, deployment, and user state migration are concerned. This one’s going to take some work and experience to get through, so be prepared to invest substantial time and effort in preparing, unless you work with these tools and technologies on a daily basis. My guess is that those conditions hold only in enterprises or outside services companies big or specialized enough to have their own Vista deployment teams. How many of those can there be? The total count for MCTS: Business Desktop Deployment certified professionals as of 10/27/08 is 4,868, so the answer could be: “More than you think!”

The Application Compatibility Check Process a la Microsoft

For the next couple of weeks, I’ll be digging into issues related to application compatibility for organizations and enterprises considering the move to Windows Vista. For such outfits, one of the most important and pressing concerns that surround a migration has to be application compatibility, which should perhaps be pithily restated as “Will my apps work with Vista?”

Microsoft is keenly aware of this potential hurdle, and has devoted considerable time, energy, and resources to creating tools, guides, and processes for assessing application compatibility. In some upcoming blogs, I’ll take a closer look at that company’s Application Compatibility Toolkit 5.0, aka ACT. In this blog, I begin the overall process of assessing application compatibility by describing that process as Microsoft sees it, and pointing to some papers, resources, and how-to’s that the company has put together to help companies and organizations see their way through it. Much of the information you’ll find here, in fact, is summarized from the company’s paper entitled “Getting Started with Application Compatibility in a Windows Deployment” (PDF document, 301KB).

In a nutshell, the process works like this:

1. Collect information about current applications in use.
2. Prioritize and rationalize applications worth testing for compatibility, and supporting after Vista deployment.
3. Test a finalized list of applications in priority order as need dictates, and resources permit.
4. Mitigate issues to make applications workable or replace them as necessary (Or as MS puts it: “remediate, upgrade, mitigate, retire”).

Centrally managed environments that have established standard desktop configurations and that control the applications allowed to run on those desktops will have the easiest time of the inventory stage. ACT includes an inventory tool, in fact, for environments that don’t already maintain one (such as Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack for Software Assurance, Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007, or SMS 2003). The idea is to put together a comprehensive list of every application and version in use on enterprise desktops.

The next step, which MS delicately labels “prioritize and rationalize” is the tricky one. This really means choosing standard versions for apps in use across multiple versions (what MS calls “application relevancy”). It also means choosing a single app when more than one is used to do the same job (such as multiple productivity suites, video editing tools, and so forth; MS calls this “application redundancy”). Finally, it means getting rid of unauthorized applications or those that, as MS puts it, “are irrelevant to the day-to-day work being done in your organization.”

After the winnowing process is done, there will be fewer applications to deal with. This is the point at which prioritization occurs, based on the relative importance of the remaining applications within your organization. Often, this means tossing names into buckets that might be labeled:

• Business Critical: essential to ongoing business operations. SLA response
• High Priority: perform vital roles in some departments or across the organization. SLA response
• Important: used frequently but won’t cause work stoppages if it fails. SLA response
• Optional: Approved applications in limited use not directly related to business functions. Not covered by SLA, and receive “best-effort” IT response.

The categorization process also involves identifying applications essential for business or operations to proceed, and for typical job roles to be enacted. Prioritization within buckets requires management buy-in and means tackling items from the top down, once there’s agreement on what’s on top, and how items are ordered from there.

Next comes application testing, which is where you’ll decide which applications can be made to work, and which ones may need to be retired and replaced. Ultimately, the idea is to work toward a collection of software components that get the necessary work done and that also work properly with Vista. More on this in my next blog!

For more ACT resources, check out
Just Released: Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT)5.0.3
ACT 5.0 Deployment Guide
ACT 5.0 Step by Step Guides
TechNet Webcast: Making Windows Vista Application Compatibility Testing More Predictable
Webcast: Debugging for Application Compatibility Issues with Chris Jackson (interested readers should also check out Jackson’s Blog)
Windows Vista Application Compatibility Training Recordings

Managing Application Compatibility for Windows Vista

In a perfect world, IT professionals wouldn’t have to worry about application compatibility issues: everybody would already have embraced the latest versions of Visual Studio (2008) and the .NET Framework (3.5), and all code would run on Vista seamlessly and unhindered. Yeah, right! In the real world, however, all kinds of interesting code still runs, and needs to keep running, be it orphaned, legacy, unsupported, or whatever other trouble-making adjectives might apply to same. All of this conspires to make Application Compatibility a real concern for Windows Vista administrators, if not something of a “dirty word” to that doughty community. In my next series of upcoming blogs, I intend to dig into this subject from a number of different points of view, and examine some important tools and resources available to Vista admins to help them tackle and handle the sometimes tricky tasks of assessing, testing, and where possible, forcing applications to work properly on Vista desktops.

To kick off this discussion, I want to point at a Web page in the Microsoft Technet Windows Client TechCenter. It’s entitled “Application Compatibility and User Account Control” and provides all kinds of tools, information, and material to help IT professionals and managers deal with application compatibility issues at all conceivable levels.

The key resources portion of this page itemizes some interesting elements, some of which I’ll cover in more detail in upcoming blogs:

• the Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT)
• the Windows Vista Compatibility Center (covers both hardware and software, in fact)
• the Application Compatibility Factory (ACF)

You’ll also find some fascinating discussions of “software shims” (small bits of custom-crafted software designed to fit between (older) applications and (newer) operating systems) in a paper called Managing Shims in the Enterprise with an accompanying Stock Viewer Shim Demo Application.

As you deal with application compatibilty issues with Windows Vista, don’t forget its own built-in Program Compatibility wizard (you can launch this by typing
%systemroot%\System32\mshta.exe Trackback URL