I was doing some research for work today when I came across a solution from Microsoft that I’ve never heard of before. Zero Touch Provisioning appears to be a subscription based deployment method that sits on top of SMS 2003 SP1 or above. It’s part of the BDD so documentation is abundant but useless (lots of blurb, circular references and little substance) as we’ve come to expect from BDD. However, based on the little info on this site, this appears to be quite intruiging!
EDIT:
After beating the mouse a bit, I’ve managed to find the following:
Solution Accelerator for BDD includes the following ZTP services as sample tasks that can be automated:
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Add a user to a security group |
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Remove a user from a security group |
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Add a user to an e-mail distribution list |
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Remove a user from an e-mail distribution list |
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Subscribe to a published application |
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Unsubscribe from a published application |
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Upgrade a computer to Windows XP |
It appears that ZTP uses Biztalk and Sharepoint to integrate deployment solutions and to provide a "friendly" interface to allow delegation of the above tasks. This sounds quite interesting!