Software Deployment

Hmmnn...

That's a tough one.

Software usually goes into one of a number of profiles.

If no user has logged on, the system doesn't know into/for which profile to install your software.

Even running installs from a login script REQUIRES one to log on... and even GPOs require a login.

Making any registry changes to HKCU will fail, because there IS no current user when you try to install.

When you say that your installs created by Snapshot/Diff are working fine, what do you mean? Do you mean that you are able to install them before login?

...just trying to help.

- Sean

It is possible to install software even if no user is logged in. In my company we use Tivoli to do that but you also can do it manually. Try to install your MSI-package with the task scheduler from windows with this command:
msiexec.exe /i PATH+PACKAGENAME.MSI /qb-!
Create a task that will run in 5 minutes and is using the local administrator account and log off from your workstation and wait for the 5 minutes plus the time the installation will typical take to be finished. If that works, you must find a way to create a new task from remote and that's it!

Hope this will help.

Oliver

Another way to do it is to create a computer based Group Policy Object in Active Directory and push out Office, ect. I outlined the steps in this thread:

http://itninja.com/question/distribution-message0

craig --<>.

Craig is right (thanks again Craig)

When you distribute software via an AD GPO, after the computer reboots, the software will install before the ctrl-alt-del screen is even available. So let's say you are distributing Office with it, the Office install will complete (5-8 minutes depending on network) before the use even sees the log in screen. There is however a box that pops up and tells what software is installing.

I highly recommend pushing with a GPO. After I figured it out it has really been effective.

CB

I also suggest that you push yuor Office/Outlook install as vanilla or with an ADM and then push the policies for them via GPO as well.

You can set heaps of Office/Outlook settings this way......ie. say your legacy users are still on OFfice97. You can set OfficeXP to SaveAs Word/Excel.doc in 97 format to stay compatible with the legacy users until everyone is on OfficeXP. Then simply change it to native format.

we use this in our console one app object :

path
%officeserver%\VOL1\nt_apps\Core\Office2003\Office2003\Setuppro.exe

parameters
TRANSFORMS="\\%officeserver%\VOL1\nt_apps\Core\Office2003\Office2003\Trial6.MST" /qb

obviously change the unc paths. Worked a treat