Assessing Your Current Environment

Applies To: Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2003 with SP1, Windows Server 2003 with SP2

Assessing your current environment is the first step toward identifying how IntelliMirror can meet your desktop management needs. To identify the areas where IntelliMirror can provide the most benefit for your organization, examine how you perform your desktop management tasks. For example, evaluate how your IT staff handles common desktop management situations such as the following:

• New applications that need to be made available to users as quickly as possible.

• Users who move from one location to another and must retain access to their primary applications and data even on a different computer.

• Users who travel frequently and have intermittent network access, sometimes over slow links.

• New employees who require a newly configured computer that includes all their required applications.

• Users who receive new computers and need to have an operating system installed, along with their applications and data.

Use this process as a starting point to define the tasks your IT group performs for configuration management. You need to determine:

• How your organization currently performs the tasks associated with change and configuration management

• How your organization currently manages desktops

After you determine how your organization manages desktops, you can create a flowchart or table to identify the most common and frequently occurring desktop management tasks that your IT department performs.