Windows 7 Planning Deployment

Creating an application inventory is the main task you must complete when planning application deployment. You use the inventory to prioritize applications-determining which are not compatible with Windows 7, which you must repackage for automatic installation, and so on. The Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) provides tools for collecting an application inventory based on the production network.

After creating an application inventory, you must take the following planning steps for each application in the list:

• Priorities Prioritize the application inventory so that you can focus on the most important applications first. Focus on the applications that help your organization provide products and services to customers. While you are prioritizing the inventory, you might discover duplicate applications (different versions of the same application or different applications fulfilling the same purpose) that you can eliminate. You may also discover many applications that were used for a short-term project and are no longer required.
• Categories Categorize each application in the inventory as a core application or a supplemental application. A core application is common to most computers (virus scanners, management agents, and so on), whereas a supplemental application is not.
• Installation method Determine how to install the application automatically. Whether the application is a core or supplemental application, you achieve the best results by completely automating the installation. You cannot automate the installation of some legacy applications; you must repackage them. If so, the best time to choose a repackaging technology is while planning deployment. For more information about repackaging technologies, see the section titled "Repackaging Legacy Applications" later in this tutorial.
• Determine responsibility Determine who owns and is responsible for the installation and support of each application. Does IT own the application or does the user's organization own it?
• Subject matter experts You will not have the in-depth understanding of all applications in the organization that you will need to repackage them all. Therefore, for each application, identify a subject matter expert (SME) who can help you make important decisions. A good SME is not necessarily a highly technical person. A good SME is the person most familiar with an application, its history in the organization, how the organization uses it, where to find the media, and so on.
• Configuration Based on feedback from each application's SME, document the desired configuration of each application. You can capture the desired configuration in transforms that you create for Windows Installer-based applications or within packages that you create when repackaging older applications. Configuring older applications is usually as easy as importing Registration Entries (.reg) files on the destination computer after deployment.

ACT 5.5 provides data organization features that supersede the application inventory templates in earlier versions of MDT. With ACT 5.5, you can categorize applications a number of ways: by priority, risk, department, type, vendor, complexity, and so on. You can also create your own categories for organizing the application inventory.