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Meeting OMB’s deadline

Agencies must perform these seven action items to establish a standard desktop configuration by February 2008, as required by the Office of Management and Budget.

• Test configurations in a nonproduction environment to identify adverse effects on system functionality.
• Implement and automate enforcement for using the configurations.
• Restrict administration of configurations to authorized employees.
• Ensure that new acquisitions include these configurations by June 30, 2007, and require vendors to certify that their products operate effectively using the configurations.
• Apply Microsoft patches available from the Homeland Security Department for new Windows XP or Vista vulnerabilities.
• Provide National Institute of Standards and Technology documentation if configurations are modified, and the rationale for making the changes.
• Ensure that agency capital planning and investment control processes incorporate the configurations.

Automation is essential for smooth migration

A word of advice for agencies preparing to migrate to a standard desktop configuration, new operating systems such as Microsoft Vista or a new hardware platform: Automate the process as much as you can.

Adopting an automated migration approach allowed information technology specialists at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to replace close to 5,000 desktop computers in three months, said Cynthia Bell, an information technology specialist at FDIC’s information technology division.

The task of deploying new hardware with a standard configuration for each computer might have taken six months or more if FDIC had not chosen a tool that automated the migration efforts, Bell said.

The agency used Intrinsic Technologies’ Single Worldwide Image (SWIMAGE) framework to migrate users’ existing settings onto new hardware. “We used the product to come up with one standard configuration that worked on all desktops,” she said.

Previously, the agency used Symantec Technology’s Ghost software, but it produced static images of users’ desktops. As soon as a new application or security hot fix came out, that image would be out of date. “You would have to rebuild the image every quarter,” Bell said.

Now, if a Microsoft security patch is introduced and has to be deployed immediately, it can be incorporated into SWIMAGE so any newly built PC or new PC deployment will have that security patch in it without doing the whole process over again, she said.

Additionally, the product allows for more hardware independence. “If I had a Hewlett-Packard desktop and a Dell desktop — without SWIMAGE or other products that do the same thing — I would have had to create an image for HP because the drivers are specific to that and an image for Dell because there are drivers specific to it,” she said.

Now, “I have one process that uses additional coding and scripting to decipher what hardware I need for my specific platform,” she added.

Bell said the product could provide a smoother transition to Microsoft Vista if the agency decided to make that move. The agency could use existing hardware and send updates automatically to desktops by using Microsoft Systems Management Server.

“We could actually upgrade a number of users overnight from XP to Vista and have the same standard configuration on every one of those PCs upgraded,” she said. But for now, Bell’s focus is on replacing as many as 4,000 laptop computers. “We will be using SWIMAGE to deploy a standard configuration set to all the laptops in the environment.”

— Rutrell Yasin