Introduction

Article
12/19/2007

Changes, such as deploying a new operating system, can result in the need for new hardware, software, personnel, or processes. Such changes should be controlled and managed by quality processes to guarantee up-to-date information about the information technology (IT) environment and the ability to recover from a rollout problem. The procedures for achieving such a managed, secure rollout are called release management.

Release Management is one of several service management functions (SMFs) defined in different operating frameworks such as the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and Microsoft® Operations Framework (MOF).

This guide is intended to be used as a part of Microsoft Deployment Solution Accelerator. Microsoft Deployment is the next version of Business Desktop Deployment (BDD) 2007.

Note In this document, Windows applies to the Windows Vista®, Windows® XP Professional, Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, Windows Server® 2008, and Windows Server 2003 operating systems unless otherwise noted.

Background

Before upgrading from its current version of the Windows operating system, an organization must ensure that the rollout of an operating system will not disturb daily operations and that a back-out process is in place to bring the environment to a known state if a problem does occur during rollout. The organization may have to deal with different types of operating system rollouts, such as a new installations and in-place upgrades. Each type of rollout must have its own rollout plan, schedule, and back-out strategy.

The Release Management SMF is documented in ITIL and MOF and is tightly coupled to the Change and Configuration Management SMFs. Rollouts are the product of a change request coming from the Change Management process, and their results should be fully documented trough the Configuration Management process.

Note This guide does not describe in detail the Change Management and Configuration Management processes. For information about change management, see Service Management Functions: Change Management at https://www.microsoft.com/technet/solutionaccelerators/cits/mo/smf/smfchgmg.mspx. For information about configuration management, see Service Management Functions: Configuration Management at https://www.microsoft.com/technet/solutionaccelerators/cits/mo/smf/smfcfgmg.mspx.

Prerequisites

This guide requires basic knowledge of ITIL foundations or MOF principles. For more information, see MOF: An Actionable and Prescriptive Approach to ITIL at https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=A030626B-C2E4-4D7C-AB75-832D360C86ED.

Assumptions

This guide assumes that team members have already selected the different technologies to be used for tracking changes, configurations, and releases. With this assumption, the guide can concentrate on process instead of technology. It is also assumed that team members have a basic understanding of the following SMFs:

Change Management
Configuration Management
Release Management

Education and References

Microsoft TechNet and the Microsoft Web site (https://www.microsoft.com) offer white papers and articles that provide additional information and background on MOF. For more information about MOF, visit https://www.microsoft.com/technet/solutionaccelerators/cits/mo/mof/default.mspx.

The U.K. Office of Government Commerce (https://www.ogc.gov.uk/guidance_itil.asp) and the IT Service Management Forum Web site (https://www.itsmf.org) offer books and articles that provide additional information and background on ITIL.

Introduction

On This Page

Background

Prerequisites

Assumptions

Education and References

Additional resources