During the last three years I've posted a lot of articles on what was first the Juice and is now Symantec Connect. I wanted to look back on all these articles and what they gave me as a technical writer and specialist. I will give you the links to all the articles, but I also wanted to make article 100 a special gift to the community.
In June 2006 I went to an event that was arranged by Altiris. At that time I was working as a technical specialist for a governmental institute in the Netherlands. In my job I was responsible for application maintenance and was head of the team. It was made up of 14 people who managed applications, packaged applications and tested them for a 1000+ Citrix environment. During the event Altiris demonstrated SVS and somehow it intrigued me. That could be a huge solution for lots of the problems we encountered. But it was not working on Citrix. It took me several weeks before I understood why and I solved it.
We started using it and we loved it, but we were not able to buy licenses because Altiris did not support it. That was solved by a gift of enough licenses to do the job and together with that we bought a few Wise Packaging Studio licenses.
A few months later we had to reimage over 500 computers and a company offered to do it, but it was very expensive. As usual I thought, let's do it yourselves. I had over 6 years experience in Altiris Deployment Solution.
So we bought 800 Deployment Solution licenses and we did the complete migration in less then 14 hours.
It was a huge success.
During this time I also found out that there was a website for SVS enthusiasts: juice.altiris.com.
I became a member and I started contributing. First it only covered SVS, but during the years more and more of the Altiris portfolio came to it.
Juice was a great website and lots of contributors helped the site to become a single place to learn all about Altiris. And yes, you were getting points for submitting and these points could be traded in for goodies.
After Symantec bought Altiris the Juice disappeared and it became www.symantec.com/connect.
In the beginning I missed Juice a lot. What happened to our community where we posted good stuff and good articles? What about Talk Like a Pirate Day?
Now after months I've gotten used to Connect and it is becoming better every week. Problems are solved, people helped a lot to make it possible to do what we wanted to do.
My special thanks goes out to:
Ohzone
MBmillecam
Juicemaster
and Leslie Miller.
During all these years I have posted articles in Dutch, English and French. In this article I will only give the links to the English articles.
- SVS in Practice in a Company with More Than 500 Users
- Use SVS on Terminal Servers with DeltaISIS
- Leveraging Virtualization... Erik's Way
- DVS4SBC and Profile Management
- Packaging Large, Larger, the Largest Applications!
- Altiris Deployment Solution for HP Thin Clients
- Adobe CS 3 Packaging
- HP Rapid Deployment Pack in Action
- The Many Faces of Virtualization
- Software Virtualization Enters the Mainstream
- Setting File Permissions Inside SVS Layers
- Packaging Internet Explorer 8
- Welcome to Las Vegas
- Deploying Vista SP1 or Not. That is the Question!
- Troubleshooting Virtual Software Packages
- Handling Office 2007 License Keys with SVS
- SVS Packaging Best Practices
- SVS Packaging Best Practices, Part 2: Packaging Daemon Tools
- SVS Packaging Best Practices, Part 3: Update Existing Layer
- SVS Packaging Best Practices, Part 4: Exclusions
- SVS Best Practices, Part 5: Restoring a Crashed PC
- Configuring Default Machines for Packaging
- Building a VSA of Windows Live Beta
- Using AppStream to Deploy Packages on Demand for Your Offsite Users, Part 1
- Using AppStream to Deploy Packages on Demand for Your Offsite Users, Part 2
- Using AppStream to Deploy Packages on Demand for Your Offline Users, Part 3
- Everything You Always Wanted to Know About SVS but Were Afraid to Ask
- Uninstall Software Using Altiris Deployment Solution
- Sysprep Script for Automatic Deployment XP and Win2003
- How to Synchronise Your PXE Over Various Servers in Other Locations
- Hardware Detection Without Using HII
- Uninstall Office 2003 and Install Office 2007
- How To: Create Your Own Bootable ESX 3i USB Stick
- Building a VMware Shared Disk
- SWV Wow, What a Great Improvement!
- Deployment Console
- Deployment Console, Part 1: The Way You Should Implement It
- Deployment Console, Part 2: Installing Deployment Solution 6.9 on Our Home Site and on Other Sites.
- Deployment Console, Part 3: Configure Your Multisite PXE Environment
- Deployment Console, Part 4: Configuring Microsoft DFS for Deployment Server File Synchronisation
- Deployment Console, Part 5: Install HII Tools and Configure Them for a Multi Site Environment
- Deployment Console, Part 6: Automating Tasks to Build the Coolest Deployment Solution
- Deployment Console, Part 7: Building a Clean, Lean Windows XP Machine and Deploy it with Altiris Deployment Solution
- Deployment Console, Part 8: Building a Clean, Lean Windows XP Machine with DS
- Deployment Console, Part 9: The Ultimate DS 6.9 HII .bin
- Error 18 in SVS Explained, and a Workaround
- Wise Package Studio for Beginners
- Wise Package Studio, Part 1: Installing and Configuring Wise Package Studio 7
- Wise Package Studio, Part 2: Building Your First Package
- Wise Package Studio, Part 3: Windows Installer Editor
- Wise Package Studio, Part 4: Start Guide for the Virtual Package Editor
- Wise Package Studio, Part 5: Package Dot NET Framework 2.0
- Wise Package Studio, Part 6: Building an XP Client Packaging Machine
- Wise Package Studio, Part 7: Use Install Tailor to Create a Transform File
- Wise Package Studio, Part 8: Building an Office 2003 Generic Transform File
- Wise Package Studio, Part 9: Packaging the WAIK - Windows Automated Installation Kit
- Wise Package Studio, Part 10: Orca, What is It and Why Do We Need It?
- Wise Package Studio, Part 11: Testing Our Packages
- Using Workflow as a Self Service Point for Your Users!
- Workflow as a Self Service Point for Your Users, Part 2: Installing the Notification Server for Workflow Authentication
- Workflow as a Self Service Point for Your Users, Part 3: Installing Workflow Solution
- Workflow as a Self Service Point for Your Users, Part 4: Installing and Configuring Altiris Workflow Designer
- Symantec Workspace Virtualization at a Quick Glance
- How Symantec Workspace Virtualisation Can Help Reduce Your Carbon Footprint
- Symantec Endpoint Virtualisation Almost Open for Customers! Read the First Review
- Pitfalls of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure
- How to Convert Vmware Windows XP IDE Disk to LSILogic SCSI
- It's All About Sysprep
- It's All About Sysprep, Part 2
- It's All About Sysprep, Part 3
- Deep Intro to VMware ESX, Part 1
- Deep Intro to VMware ESX, Part 2
- Deep Intro to VMware ESX, Part 3
- Deep intro to VMware ESX, Part 4
- Deep Intro to VMware ESX, Part 5
- Deep Intro to VMware ESX, Part 6: VMware Tools
- Deep Intro to VMware, Part 1
- Deep Intro to Vmware, Part 2: Virtual Center
- Deep Intro to VMware, Part 3: Virtual Infrastructure Client
- Deep Intro to VMware, Part 4: Cloning
- Deep Intro to VMware, Part 5: VMware View
- Deep Intro to VMware, Part 6: VMware View Agent and Client
- Deep Intro to VMware, Part 7: VMware Converter
- Deep Intro to VMware, Part 8: Snapshot
- Deep Intro to VMware, Part 9: Protect Your Virtual Disks From Deletion
- Create Your Own ESXi 4 Bootable USB Stick
Over 86 articles written in English that (I hope) helped a lot of people to do their work better or easier.
I have gotten a lot of responses, was asked to speak at packaging and virtualisation conventions and events, packaged software for companies all over the world, and still I'm doing a lot of work that came to me by Connect.
I received several thousand emails from members asking me questions, telling me that I made small mistakes that could be solved easier and from members that just wanted to ask me non-technical stuff.
In Las vegas, Malta and other places I have met several of the other Connect members, and I'm doing business with several members.
Yes, Juice and now Connect are the place to be to find Altiris and Symantec related questions, answers etc.
And I'm planning to go further with the next 100 articles.
But before that I first need to post article 100. And that should be a special one.
Now I'm ready for holiday and a few conferences (Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, Cincinnati and Francisco) in the states.
Have a good holiday for all that are ready to go and for every body that is already back, keep things going.