As you might have seen on the Windows for your Business Blog we have released the next version of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) called MDOP 2011 R2. For those of you not familiar with MDOP, it is a suite of products that can help streamline desktop deployment, management, and support. MDOP 2011 R2 includes a new product, Microsoft BitLocker Administration and Monitoring (MBAM), and updates to the Microsoft Diagnostic and Recovery Toolkit (DaRT), and the Microsoft Asset Inventory Service.

Over the past few months we have talked a lot about the three products but for those you not familiar with them let me give you a quick summary:

• Microsoft BitLocker Administration and Monitoring (MBAM) - Builds on BitLocker in Windows 7, to help simplify BitLocker provisioning and deployments, improve compliance and reporting, and reduce support costs. MBAM helps with provisioning and deployment by reducing the complexity of deploying BitLocker as part or independent of your Windows 7 upgrade and allows you the ability to control which make/models are encrypted. To improve compliance and reporting MBAM has out of box reports that provide insight into how compliant your organization is with your defined BitLocker encryption policies. Support costs can be reduced since it proves a secure web page to easily get recovery keys and standard users can start the encryption process or change their PIN without calling support. To learn more about MBAM check out the three part blog series A.J. Smith did (part 1, part 2, part 3)and the MBAM deployment and architecture overview video.
• Microsoft Diagnostic and Recovery Toolkit 7.0 (DaRT) - A set of tools to help easily recover unusable PCs, rapidly diagnose probable causes of issues, and quickly repair unbootable or locked-out systems. In this new version we introduce more flexible deployment options like booting into DaRT from the network and the ability to remote control a DaRT session. These new features can make your job even easier since you can sit at your desk and walk a user through how to boot into DaRT over the network, and then remote control into the session. For more details on DaRT check out the interview I did with Brad McCabe and the DaRT overview video.
• Asset Inventory Service (AIS) – A cloud based asset management service that helps you translate your inventory data into actionable information. This update to AIS provided detailed hardware information on the computers in your inventory, software reports that aggregate products by major and minor versions, support for inventorying of Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) applications, and is localized in eleven languages with support up to 100,000 clients per account. To learn more about AIS check out the Making Asset Intelligence Easier with AIS post and the AIS overview video we recently posted.

I recommend that you go out and download MDOP 2011 R2 now. If you have an MDOP subscription you can get the bits from the Microsoft Volume Licensing website or you have a MSDN or TechNet subscription you can get it there for testing and trial purposes. To learn more about MBAM, DaRT, AIS and the rest of the MDOP products check out the MDOP Zone on the Springboard Series on TechNet. You can also find more MDOP videos that cover topics like deployment and how to use the products our MDOP video page.