1) DS 6.9 is very intuitive for imaging, and very simple. It is also very mature as a product line, has lots of sample jobs you can emulate, lots of wizards, and of course the 32bit console makes it fast, generally. It's also a 1-trick pony in a way, and much easier to make intuitive, because all it has to do is imaging, really well. Oh, and frankly, it's the best product there is on the market for that.
2) DS 7.1 is a new product, in many ways, and we've made mistakes - as you'd expect with something new. Some of the mistakes we made, frankly, was trying to re-create the 6.9 "look and feel" to help people who were upgrading. The problem was that we were trying to integrate into a new platform and hold to an old standard, which works against ourselves. The most important thing to rememer though is that it's new. It has a similar number for the build to match the NS product, but it's really very new.
I don't say that as an excuse - it's not. It's simply a way of looking at things to help understand how difficult it is to get a product up to speed. I've been supporting DS for about 6 years, and believe me, we STRUGGLED in the early DS 6.1 days. The Engine had issues, PXE had issues, hidden partitions had conflicts, and on and on. But we tend to forget once we look at what we have. Most importantly though, we "expect" the next version to be better. And well we should.
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All that said, there is one benefit to starting out with the ITMS beta. There are some things we're finally getting right now. The task assignment with drag-and-drop in the console is much better than we had in the previous/current release. The console is MUCH FASTER than in the current release. The look and feel, though different (very different) is more intuitive than it was before. There is more "wizard" action than there was before, to help you get things done.
But boy is it different!!!!
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May I suggest to all readers of this post that perhaps we should look at this a bit like when Vista/Win7 released? Or when XP released? Or when Win95 released? Each time a new "look and feel" of the OS released from MS, we had complaints and grumbling. I know, because I've been supporting Windows WS and Servers since Win3.1. Every time the Look and Feel changed, it was a learning curve, but eventually, the new "look" catches on and we end up loving it and hating the next one.
ITMS 7.1 is a huge change - granted - from DS 6.9, but it's a bit like Win7 to XP, and there are some nice things happening in there that will make managing systems a lot more intuitive than before. There's a lot of effort that has gone in to making all the products more intuitive or less of a pain, depending on how you look at it.
And believe me, there's more coming for DS.
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Finally, we do have some documentation for DS that you can use right now, beyond what we are "officially" creating. I created a little utility called SMART for DS7 that you could install that includes some docs, but I've not upgraded it to work with ITMS 7.1. Sooooo, I'll post my documentation seperately, still under the SMART for DS7 headings. There are currently 3 such postings (I wish I knew how to remove 2 of them) and I'll add a few more. These are "draft" documents, because I'm not the documentation team, and I've never officially had time to get sign-off or completion on them. I erred on the side of posting early to get it in your hands rather than posting 100% complete, if that makes sense. One of them is how to set up and configure PXE. Another is how to troubleshoot DS (just finishing this) at a relatively high-level. I think both may be useful for you.
Look for an intial version of both of these within 24 hrs.
Thanks for your product support!