Deployment in the WIM World - Part One

Microsoft have announced that Vista will be deployed using their new imaging format WIM (also used in the OSD feature of SMS 2003). The suggestion seems to be that this technology can be used with any operating system, not just Vista. So I've begun to do some research into using WIM instead of Ghost for XP, 2003 and eventually Vista deployments.

What's Required?
First of all you need the Vista Windows Automated Installation Kit, which is available from Microsoft Connect (www.connect.microsoft.com) as part of the Business Desktop Deployment 2007 for Windows Vista and the 2007 Microsoft Office system . This is a very large download. From there you can generate WIM files using the imageX utility. For more details on WIM see ImageX and WIM Image Format on microsoft.com .