Systems Management

You can build a collection based on absence of a given software title...

Out of curiosity, what's driving you away from GPO-based software distribution?

If you were using GPO, then I'm assuming your packages are MSI's. If so, then even if they rerun silently, they'll bomb out gracefully with no change to the machine so I wouldn't panic too badly.

yeah, good point turbokitty. don't you just love msi's ;)

revizor,

my main issue with gpo based software deployment is i've currently got over 60 software deployment policies that each machine has to process when it starts, and each user has to process when they logon. i'm being pressured to reduce startup/logon times and i feel moving all this to sms is a good start. my second issue with gpo software deployment is the restriction of only being able to deploy msi's. zap files aren't applicable at my site as all our users are restricted in regards to software installation.

i like sms because over time i've gone away from repackaging software into msi's. and i now prefer to either create a transform to cater for my changes to existing msi's, or simply use whatever installer the vendor has decided to use and run it silently using command line switches. sms also allows me to run reg files and vb scripts for some of the more tricky installations.

i like gpo based deployment for two reasons: it installs the software befor the user can logon, which is ideal for software that requires a reboot, and i do appreciate that when a computer falls out of scope of the software depoyment gpo, the software is uninstalled. beats having to create a seperate uninstall program in sms and advertising it.

still, i feel the benefits of sms deployment outweigh that of gpo deployment.

just my thoughts...

Can I just point out that you don't have to have 60 policies to deploy 60 software titles? I deploy 200 packages through the same policy, with ACLs set up on the package level inside the same GPO, and the boot time does not seem to suffer from having that many packages.

GPO has some glaring shortcomings. The biggest are the inability to deploy custom setups, the massive inflexibility when trying to manage branch locations, and reporting.. but I could go on and on. GPO is just a little tool that Microsoft threw in for free with Windows... like RIS.
It's not a serious deployment tool, especially if you're a medium-large to large organization.