Systems Management

We're running SCCM 2007 R2 with XP SP3 and Office 2007. First of all, I'm not the SCCM admin but I am allowed to make reasonable requests to him.

What we're looking at now is we have a department that is broken up into smaller divisions. Each division has a specific set of apps that they need installed.

The corporate XP image is essentially locked and we can't make any changes since it is used globally across the company.
Therefore we've come up with task sequences that will run to set up each division with their special set of apps.

So here's what I've been trying to do:

I have collections for each group and have the task sequences advertised to them with manditory high priority run immediately, ignore all maintenance windows etc.

So when I deploy XP to a new system, I add the computer name to the collection ahead of time. So hopefully it would pick up right after the initial OS build. Unfortunately it does not. SCCM being what it is does not give the instant gratification that I need and building a single system this way takes up to a day.

I've tried prodding it along by updating the machine policy and updating the collection membership every so often but still after the OS load is done, it can take up to an hour to populate.

We're trying to hand off SCCM system builds to our stockroom guys and would like to make it as simple as possible without requiring them to prod the client and console along.

Do you have any suggestions that don't require making image changes? What about putting something in the initial menu from Win PE that allows you to pick the OS and secondary task sequence? Or some kind of advertisement that has both?

At some point we are going to the third release of SCCM 2007 with the dynamic collections, but that may be a bit off from now and we're retiring our old Symantec Live State system that we currently use to deploy the software for this group.

The current method involves us loading the company image onto the computer, and then after that's done, installing the Symantec Livestate client and dropping the profile with all the apps on it on the system and hitting "Wake/Push" This gives us an immediate deployment and 15/20 minutes later the system is built completely. With SCCM it takes 45 minutes to an hour for it to even show up in the collection.

Any ideas?