UIU Case Studies

Reinhart, Boerner, Van Deuren s.c.

The law firm of Reinhart, Boerner, Van Deuren s.c., has offered a wide variety of services to small and large businesses, individuals, and non-profit organizations around the world for over 120 years. They have six locations in Wisconsin, Illinois and Phoenix with over 200 attorneys and 250 support staff providing first-class legal services ranging from Business Law to Intellectual Property to Litigation and much more.

To manage their IT system operations and OS deployment in their mixed environment, which includes a substantial Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, Reinhart relies on the powerful systems management platform from Microsoft, System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM). Leading the Reinhart IT Team is IT Director, Justin McLaughlin, an experienced administrator with over 10 years managing SCCM.

You don’t have to deal with driver image models ever again. The UIU plug-in for SCCM is a no-brainer.

Justin McLaughlin, IT Director

The Challenge with Drivers in SCCM

Because of Justin’s experience with SCCM, he is intimately familiar with the capabilities of Microsoft’s robust platform. As much as SCCM made systems management far more comprehensive at Reinhart, his team continued to experience significant challenges with driver management. As with many organizations, Reinhart’s hardware disparity, consisting of a mix of legacy and new machines from different manufacturers, caused challenges with OS deployment. SCCM’s cumbersome driver management requirements further compounded this challenge forcing the IT team to manually search for install files for production drivers or physically create them, inject proper driver models, and then ensure proper configuration. In addition, there were unknown limits on the number of driver .cabs per package. This resulted in, as Justin put it, “a disproportionate number of spec’d out jobs to image each machine to ensure each PC has received the correct driver set.”

The Reinhart IT Team wanted to find a more efficient way to handle drivers, but the best they could do with the existing capabilities of SCCM was to be as diligent and organized as possible for each driver and .cab file. The additional time required for initial setup aside, each time there was an update or new driver to add, the re-organization process took up a considerable amount of time and resources.

If they were able to locate the existing appropriate package, and the new driver file was configured correctly, they could inject it into the package. If not, they were forced to create a new package to correspond to the new hardware collection. Then the only way to test the accuracy of the package was on deployment. If drivers were missing or configured incorrectly, or an incorrect package was added to a particular Task Sequence, the process became quite time-consuming. A Better Way to Manage Drivers in SCCM When Reinhart learned about the Universal Imaging Utility System Deploy Plug-in (UIU plug-in for SCCM) Justin and his team were eager to test it. What they found was that the UIU plug-in for SCCM completely eliminated all of the driver headaches they experienced in the past. After a quick installation, the UIU plug-in for SCCM inserted itself seamlessly into their SCCM framework. Then, instead of manually organizing and packaging each individual .cab file, they needed only to run a Task Sequence including the UIU plug-in for SCCM Machine Configuration Step. The only thing left was to Advertise their new Task Sequence to any Collection of PCs regardless of manufacturer or model, and the deployment would be successful. Not only were existing drivers automatically handled, but new driver updates automatically updated within the UIU plug-in for SCCM Package for future Task Sequence assignment.

I can’t emphasize enough how nice it is to explore hardware that is the most beneficial for our organization - whatever the brand.

Justin McLaughlin, IT Director

No More Driver Headaches

The UIU plug-in for SCCM is a fully integrated plug-in specifically designed for Microsoft SCCM. The UIU plug-in for SCCM contains a vetted and updated driver database of over 40,000 business class Plug-and-Play IDs. A real-time Discovery Tool ascertains the on-board hardware of every PC in an environment and assigns only the best driver for each component during Mini-Setup. The UIU plug-in for SCCM completely eliminates the need to locate and inject driver .cab files, organize, and package them.

Justin concluded by stating, “Management of drivers in SCCM is messy. Even if we could keep up with separate .cabs and separate packages for separate classes of machines, let alone updates and newer driver releases, maintaining all of this is a nightmare. We are really thrilled with the UIU plug-in for SCCM. Anything that I ever envisioned in a perfect world for driver management in SCCM, the UIU plug-in for SCCM completely exceeded.”