Software Deployment

Hi all,

I've read numerous posts here relating to the update of Adobe Shockwave Player 11.5 (11.5.7.609). However, having read so many different scenarios, I'm finding it a little confusing as to know what sort of route to go down with this. I'm wondering if anyone can volunteer their experiences before I roll?

We've got 5,000 XP images, and having used SMS/SCCM hardware/software inventory, and I can see that we have various flavours of 10.x, 11.0.x, and some 11.5.x's already (manually installed by users). Unfortunately I have inherited an environment where proper managed automation of such updates was not done, and thus it's chaotic!!

I can see that the Shockwave Player 11.5.7.609 corporate MSI won't remove any previous versions it encounters (10.x, 11.0.x), and thus I've read posts on forums where people have put together scripts that will detect previous versions first (whether that be based on SMS inventories, traversing through registry uninstall keys, etc) to do this.

However, I see that Adobe do an uninstall program (as downloadable via here: http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/alternates/#sp) and whilst I've not done any exhausted testing, I've tried running this "sw_uninstaller /s" and it does appear (albeit this might be on the surface?) to uninstall both an 11.0.x and a few different versions of 10.x Shockwave.

Therefore, my assumptions were that I could create an SMS/SCCM advertisement to run this uninstaller program, prior to then running the new 11.5.7.609 MSI.

However, I then saw this post on the Adobe forums: http://forums.adobe.com/thread/572988?tstart=0

Given the recent security advisory we are currently deciding what to do with Shockwave on our ~1,500 internal client computers.

The huge headache here, as you all know, is that their is no in-place upgrade. We must uninstall previous versions using, I imagine, sw_uninstaller.exe and then have the client systems reboot.

Then we have to push the Shockwave 11.5.6.606 package via SMS 2003. This must be done after a reboot from the previous uninstall so I'm not quite sure how we will get this to work.

In testing, I've not really managed to recreate this - in fact, it seems to be that the single uninstaller program removes a version 10.x or 11.0.x fine. The only oddity I did encounter is when running the 11.5.7.609 MSI (with or without a reboot inbetween), is that the installer program displays 'Modify' (even through no previous Flash installation is at C:\Windows\System32\Adobe or C:\Windows\System32\Macromed) rather than just going straight into an install (i.e. that its not been installed ever before). Of course, this is in manual install mode, perhaps in unattended it won't do this?

So, help, I'm a bit lost as to tried and tested methods that others have used to effectively remove various different versions of 10.x and 11.0.x in SMS/SCCM, then install 11.5, preferably silent without any kind of reboots needed?

Does the use of scripts to do this get around the reboot issue and is that why it's favoured over the sw_uninstaller program?

Any advice would be gratefully recieved! What a nightmare - is there a particular reason why the Adobe MSI doesn't remove any previous versions that might be installed already? (or just poor Adobe?)

Thanks in advance!