Question : New Windows 7 workstations in existing SBS 2003 domain

I am updating and replacing all workstations (35 in total) for one of my larger clients.  The new workstations will all be Windows 7 Professional with Office 2010 Home and Business. The new PC's need to be installed on a weekend so that when staff arrive on Monday morning, they will simply turn on their new PC, log in and thier existing profile will load without a problem.

They currently use XP Pro and Office 2003. The DC is SBS 2003 standard

My question is in two parts:

1. How do I ensure that the existing roaming profiles will work properly with Windows 7? Do I have to change any settings or patch anything? Note that roaming profiles work perfectly now and I want to ensure that they continue to work well under Windows 7. I am also keen to ensure that there is very little disruption for users when they first log in first time.

2. As I have so many workstations to create, is there a way of running up a single workstation, joining it to the domain, creating an image and then copying that image across the rest of the PC's? I know there will be a problem with SIDs so how do I get around that? It would be great if the image was created then copied to the next PC so all that had to be done would be to update the Windows and Office activation keys and not have to join each and every PC to the domain manually.

Anything else I have forgotten?

Any other ideas or hints and tips welcome....

Thanks in advance.

Answer : New Windows 7 workstations in existing SBS 2003 domain

1) Roaming profiles changed significantly from 2000/XP to Vista/win7. The Windows 7 machines will *not* pull down old roaming profiles saved by XP/2000 machines. You will need to use a tool such as the Windows Easy Transfer or USMT to trasnfer your usres'settings.

2) You didn't mention *which* weekend you planned on doing this rollout, so if you have some time to plan ahead, I'd go over and work through the documentation and use the tools here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/solutionaccelerators/dd407791.aspx

The deployment toolkit will let you automate the USMT process for migrating settings, will let you create a "master" image with all of the software you want installed prior to deployment, and covers that SID issue. But to get everything working right does require a bit of a learning curve, planning, and most importantly testing. I wouldn't want to go into a weekend set up without knowing what to expect.

As I said, there is some up-front invenstment in time in setting this up, but once done, you can deploy current and future machines all with the same process, so there is some long-term reward, even in an SBS environment. I recommend this process for any organization of decent size (10 workstations or more, give or take) due to the long term savings and consistent and predictable image deployment.