Software Deployment

There are several ways to go about it. What would make the most sense really depends upon your target systems (any pre-NT clients?) your deployment software (what are you using to push the packages?) and the types of packages (are you using silent scripted command-lines? MSI files?)

Sorry for the detail light post [8|]

We are running NT4 (SP6) and Win2K(SP3) clients using IBM's Tivoli to distibute.

Packages are a mix of Tivoli's native format packages and MSI installs, mostly Tivoli's native format at present due to issues with Tivoli and MSI [:@] (esp on NT4)

Cheers

I'm not that familiar with Tivoli, but Windows Installer supports a simple progress bar using the switch /qb add a explanation point /qb! and the cancel button becomes disabled. This will let them see progress and what is being installed.

If you are calling packages from a script, you could display a message and then shell out to the package. That way the script showing the message would close when the package you shelled out to completed. KiXtart and VBS offer some better ways to show do this, but for simplicities sake:

echo Standby, Installing Software...
start /wait \\server\share\directory\package.exe
exit

There are a couple of ways of doing this.

The simplest is to use the net send command within the package (execute program) that would run the command "net send %computername% <msg>"

The other way is to use the wrunuiep command. I have used this within a package to launch Internet Explorer with a html page as an arguement.