Rollout, Deployment and Standard Desktop

From 1995 to 1999 I was contracted to work for Mars-ISI, the IT arm of Mars Inc. Their population of over 25,000 PC's around the globe meant that they needed to standardise on applications to reduce the workload of regional support teams (and get better deals on quantity purchases).
I worked on developing the mechanism that installed and delivered the "Standard Desktop" to those PC's and their users, via installation CD's and fileservers. Each monthly update had to be 100% correct, first time and every time. My experiences at Mars led to the next two, similar, contracts for British American Tobacco and for British Petroleum, where they also rely on standardisation to manage their huge numbers of desktop and laptop PC's.
Cyclone v1 was written specifically for BP, to co-ordinate their rollout of 1000+ new PC's to their Hull chemicals site. I wrote Cyclone v2 in Access 2000 and am now writing v3 with VB and Access.
 If you want to follow in my footsteps then I can thoroughly recommend the following books:
  • The Windows 98 Registry (ISBN 1-55828-591-1)
  • Expert Guide to Windows 98 (ISBN 0-7821-1974-3)
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