Word of warning.. I tend to ramble and get lost on tangents...
I've had "HIIS" in Dev since October, its been held back by more pressing issues, but I've been tinkering with it for the past month pretty hard, I'm just being overly cautious on releasing it, because my name is behind it
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If you've used HIIS before and have not used 6.9.0.12 I HIGHLY recommend to give the 6.9.0.12 version a shot, there are several features included that the previous ones lacked. One of the main enhancements that occured in this version or the one just before, is if you have classes set, and change what drivers you're filtering out, it only removes the impacted classes and not all of them, much shorter refresh time.
Now.. about our Environment. I upgraded to 6.9.0.12 from a much older version on Saturday the 9th, wish I had done this when this version came out. We have about 3200 PCs, bunch of "One Offs" and I have collected 1238 of them, having 1180 of them supported by HIIS, the other 50 or so are secured PCs so I can't grab drivers at the moment.
We're using the Device ID method, granted it causes more compatibility classes but reduces driver issues, where two Devices Might have the same name, but the driver is clearly different. One downside to this method, is every time I add a PC, I have to go through the list of Devices known and tell it what to filter out, often as Skakid pointed out, its a "1394" Network Adapter. So first capture between Saturday and Monday put us at 1238 PCs, 271 compatibility classes, I've weeded that down to 166 classes.
For our New Equipment guys, to make our lives easier, we're going to just have them do an "Initial Deploy", so all known drivers for that Model get loaded, and nothing gets missed. Then it runs a location check and installs software from the server depending on location, and then runs a model check that deploys model specific software to the PCs. So far in Dev, I've only encountered one "Bug" and that is with the SoundMax drivers not capturing properly. Altrinsic is aware of it and working on it at the moment. A work around, is to find the driver folder, edit the INF and manually copy the listed files to the driver folder and it'll work from there.
Compared to our current method, this is far far easier.
Oh.. and anyone using it in production want to throw any advice my way, incase "I'm doing it wrong" I won't tun it down
