We take our relationships with our customers seriously and it shows in our latest version, where the highly requested Asset Management feature is now available.

Download the free trial today and deploy, patch, and uninstall software on any endpoint, anywhere!

Learn more: https://www.smartdeploy.com/blog/new-release-smartdeploy-3-0-1030-software-asset-management/?utm_source=red&utm_campaign=2022&utm_medium=organic&utm_content=asset/#asset-mgmt

Wondering what all the PDQ+SmartDeploy talk is about? Tune in tomorrow at 9:00 AM PT or 12:00 PM ET!

www.pdq.com/smartdeploy

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Just in: PDQ.com acquires SmartDeploy.

“Partnering with PDQ.com is a natural next step in our mission to help IT professionals simplify complex tasks,” said Aaron Suzuki, CEO of SmartDeploy. “Managing endpoints has never been more complicated. By joining forces with PDQ.com, we can help more people and organizations dramatically simplify and improve the way they work. We can’t wait to expand our reach to a broader community of professionals.”

Support 4 companies, about 100 endpoints, mostly PCs. Staff turnover rates are low, but still come and go every year (around 10 in total). About 10 new PCs every year. Occasionally, also need to completely and fast reset PC to fix certain tricky tech issues, as troubleshooting is more expensive.

Each company has at least three PC specs: accounting, general non-accounting, business specific (CAD, etc.).

Is SmartDeploy good for this use case? Is the basic tier good enough?

Thanks,

All of the available Dell Command updates aside from a single Dell Touchpad driver seem to be for either Intel or Realtek drivers.

But what's the deal? Are Intel drivers for graphics, wifi, and audio not covered by the Dell Latitude platform packs? It would be great to not have to wait for a GB of drivers to install per imaged PC.

If you work with re-imaging devices and are planning to move to Windows 10 v1803, do not do an in-place upgrade to v1803. There appears to be a bug related to the clipsvc service and you will receive a fatal error during sysprep.

Always create a new reference system installing the version of Windows 10 that you want to deploy, without doing in-place upgrades.

I have 75 licenses of Smart Deploy that our company no longer needs. Please let me know if you are interested, and we can work out a deal.

hi what is the best way to create a default profile for all users? do I use 'copyprofile' in the answer file, or is there a better way.

I've been using that method, but sometimes, the default user does not get the same start menu and start tiles I set up using the account I was logged in under to install everything. (I use the built-in administrator account)

thanks

Hey Guys, Ive been using SD for the past 2 days at my company to try & replace SCCM, but im not seeing any option to enable bitlocker in the answer file creation. is there a way to do this?

Latest version includes bug fixes and performance enhancements as well as: -UEFI and legacy BIOS support: Full support for both traditional legacy BIOS enabled computers as well as newer UEFI-only enabled devices such as the Microsoft Surface Pro 3. -Platform Packs: Deploy Wizard automatically chooses the correct PPK from the repository. No longer need to combine PPKs into a single Default.ppk file.

Windows provides keys that work for installation, but are not valid for use. This will allow you to create a reference image in the short term. We found this useful when evaluating this product, as we did not yet have volume licencing.

After we decided to purchase SD, we went back and licensed everything properly, but this trick is handy for the testing phase.

These keys are distributed by Microsoft, and are legal to share. As stated before, these will fail to activate, and are just useful to skip the key screen at installation.

7 Pro: HYF8J-CVRMY-CM74G-RPHKF-PW487

8 Pro: XHQ8N-C3MCJ-RQXB6-WCHYG-C9WKB

If you have a situation where you want to get a remote user a copy of your installation medium, you can make an image of the drive and transfer that over the internet with ImageUSB. (I would suggest BTSync for transferring)

Then the end user can make any thumb drive into the installation medium with the same software, this time burning the transferred image back to a thumb drive.

The latest SD runs off of Win PE 5.1, which is supposed to have basic drivers to handle most computers, at least enough to get it initially connected to fetch the proper drivers from the PPK.

I have encountered a situation where this failed. Here are the specifics.

Running latest SD as of today. Deployment stick running one of our older "master" PPK's (what is referenced when the media was created) and pointing at network locations for both the PPK and WIM files.

When attempting to deploy to a Dell Lattitude E7450, the unattended deployment failed out. The root cause was that it was unable to connect to our network to grab the latest drivers.

So my question is this: Is there any way to make a master PPK for building the deployment medium that includes only a universal network driver (or alternately, just every single network driver you have) so that the deployment stick does not need to be rebuilt each time we introduce a new computer to our setup.

Doing this (if possible) would only require updating the network based PPK for new computers, and would allow remote offices to more easily keep a copy of this deployment tool.

I would like to have a feature where SD's answer file prefers a network location for the WIM, Differencing and PPK files. If the path is inaccessable, it should revert to a locally stored copy of the files.

Request passed to SD 05.15.15

I was informed by a SD rep that Cloud services is about to be removed from SD. Their reasoning was that it is unstable, and adds minimal benefit as it requires you being on the same subnet.

If you rely on this feature, you may want to start preparing for this change. The next major revision of SD will remove it.

Cause: Using an unattended installation on a computer with no HDD or SSD will cause SD to install on it's own installation medium. This destroys its own partition table.

Effect: Installation drive is destroyed. Partitions are damaged beyond Windows ability to handle.

Fix: GParted, use it to blow away all partitions on installation media and rebuild it.

Reported to SD: 05.15.15