Yesterday’s excercise of getting those 8 new laptops ready for deployment was interesting. This is the first time I’ve ever utilized Dell’s corporate imaging services. It’s always been offered, but we never seen it to cost effective enough to utilize, thus, the imaging was left to me to perform when I received the units. Now that we’re part of a MUCH larger organization, I can see this service is very cost-effective for the entire corporation.
I was intreagued to see how it was done. As you can see in the photo, they utilize something called X-Image. So naturally, having never seen or heard of this imaging tool, I turned to Google. In my serch I found this pdf that describes Dell’s imaging process. Needless to say, it sounds pretty darn cool! To move away from the sector-based imaging tools to a more flexible file-based system has me jazzed.
Interestingly… In the same Google search I also found this “Windows Vista Disk Imaging with Ximage and Windows Imaging Format (WIM).” Taking a look at this and comparing it to the Dell product… it sure does sound like the same product and has nearly the same name. So this makes me wonder… is this a tool that was originally used for OEMs in their imaging efforts and is now making its way in to Vista? Or is this something that MS is licensing from Dell for Vista? Or even more so… might this be a knock-off of Dell’s product?
Hmmm.