Throwing a bone to deployment techs and IT admins everywhere, Microsoft has officially announced six free tools designed to assist in the deployment of Windows Vista. Though some of the tools have been available as betas for months, this marks the first official release of the six applications, designed to help enterprises automate hardware and software compliancy testing as well as the volume-licensing process. It's nice to see Microsoft reaching out to the IT department with these tools and admittedly, an app that can scour your corporate network, scan as many as 5,000 PCs and return a report on whether or not they're Vista compliant has the potential to be a huge time saver (anyone else remember having to perform physical hardware audits of each and every machine on the network?). Still, it seems unlikely that some handy tools alone will be enough to convince businesses that they need Vista--let alone to take the sting out of deployment.

For more on the new tools:
- see this ComputerWorld article