Product Brief: Prowess SmartDeploy moves to WinPE 3.0

With the upgrade announced Jan. 25, Prowess SmartDeploy Enterprise uses the Windows 7-based version of the Windows Preinstallation Environment (WinPE). Moving to WinPE 3.0 lets the product, a hardware-independant imaging solution, integrate more closely with Microsoft products such as System Center Configuration Manager.

SmartDeploy provides extra options and an improved interface for deployment. It also adds a hardware independence model for packaging drives, called a "platform" by Prowess. A platform can contain all the packages you'll need for your hardware, and many of them are available pre-made from Prowess.

The product is license per technician, so companies don't need extra licenses for features like virtualization. And speaking of virtualization, Prowess CEO Aaron Suzuki said SmartDeploy already works well in virtualization environments, and that the company is working hard to support future features, like Windows 8 and Windows runnin on ARM processors.

More on Prowess is available on their site. SmartDeploy started at $2,295 per technician.