Kace

I had never heard of Kace or a "KBOX" deployment appliance before today. I haven't seen one in person, but I watched the demo and talked to one district about the concept.

System imaging is a big deal for the K-12 community. We have hundreds (or thousands) of machines to support and many are located in labs where a single image will suffice for many machines. Apparently, the latest sales pitch for this particular device is the eventual migration to Windows 7. Districts will eventually purchase machines pre-installed with Windows 7. Along the way, there may be a need or desire to re-image some of the current install base with the new operating system. This appliance touts the ability to easily capture and deploy Windows 7 images.

Lately, several districts have lamented the fact that subtle driver differences cause an increasing number of disk images to be maintained when using a product like Ghost. This product notes an automated driver slipstreaming process as well as driver verification reporting. If a driver isn't installed that you need, you're notified on the front end and can add the driver to the appliance's library to be automatically included in deployments.

I'm sure a solution like this isn't cheap - the press release says it starts at $4,900. That's a long way from a "free" solution like FOG (previously mentioned here). However, it certainly sounds like there may be some features that could help districts save quite a bit of time.