Software Imaging questions

[mooseAndSquirrel]

I am VP of IT (so that makes me semi-clueless) at an organization with 800 PC's. My Operations folks have, in the past, really rather screwed up the imaging of the operating system. I don't want the bad experience that they had (I'm new here) to stop us from pursuing an obviously good idea. They used Zenworks, we were running Windows 98 SE, and the image that was built was built for a specific laptop and then applied to all sorts of different machines.

So I'm turning to the gurus here (who've already been great help in my building my home machines) for guidance on the best way to deploy and then manage PC's in my organization.

Any pointers to web sites?
Any pointers to good books?
Any pointers as to the "best" software to use?
Any pointers on how to deal with the hardware uniqueness of machines?

I'd like to automate as much of this as possible and both reduce the time to deploy and increase the quality and consistency of our machine preparation. Any help greatly appreciated.

Any indy contractor in the D.C. area who has good experience and references, feel free to email me.

 

[mooseAndSquirrel]

anybody?

 

[kursplat]

well i've got NO experiance doing this , but what the heck. from what i have read about this.you want the machines all the same, hardware wise.
if the're different MB's and chip sets you've got nothing but problems.
if all of 'em have the same MB but different cards, i would think you could make an image without the cards installed. use that for your distribution. then
have to install the other hardware.
if you were looking for somthing else to do the imaging with, i'm voting for Drive Image 5. been using it here at home for a bit now and it's working great.
good luck