In May of 2005, I took a week vacation from my full time consulting job with Integrated Data Systems in Virginia to take on a one week contract to help establish a process and providing packaging training.

The client had SMS Installer, Wise Package Studio and used SMS for application deployment. They had about 4500 seats running Windows 2000. Spread across a handful of sites, they wanted me to provide best practices, review and recommend processes and help setup a process for junior level participation in the packaging and deployment process.

I scripted a process that would guide anyone through the basic steps and a workflow that would move assets from step to step in order to ensure a consistent resulting package no matter who was doing the work. There were no workflow tools available for this so I used KiXtart (the langue with which I was the most comfortable) to build one from scratch including a graphical user interface to make it very simple.

Between meetings, guidance, training and development and coding of this process, they were quite happy with the one week I spent with them.