Software Deployment

Set the package to install before login?
Or do you have any user-related files to be updated?

You could also have a custom action checking for running processes and prompt the user to close them before continue.

A solution which has worked at other clients:

- Send out an enterprise-wide email saying that at 01:00am on Monday the blah of foo a global update of OurOfficeBasedApp will be deployed. Advise users that they *must* exit ALL Office apps (name them) on Friday before and that, if they don't, those apps will be forced closed, meaning that the content any open documents *may* be lost.
- Send out a reminder email a week before.
- Send out a reminder email the Friday before.
- In your package, add a script to detect the Office executables and kill them if found. There are a gazillion examples out there for process-detection and killing. Use WMI and you can do it all in script without resorting to PSKill and the like.
- If anyone complains about lost data, re-send all 3 emails.

Tough? Maybe but what choice do you have?

Thanks for the replies.

AngelD - I have tried setting the advertisement to run "at logon", but SMS's definition of "at logon" is more like "some time after logon" and as we have Word as our email editor, the 1st thing users do after logging on is to open Outlook.

VBScab - We've tried the "important" IS emails before and they are pretty much deleted straight away or ignored. My company is a law firm of about 2500 users and they heavily rely on Word, so killing the winword.exe is not an option.

I may have to look at the logon script option :(

I've tried executing the patch from the logon script with the following command line:

C:\WINDOWS\system32\msiexec.exe /p "MyAppUpdate.msp" /passive /L*v "c:\windows\MyAppUpdate.log" REINSTALL=ALL REINSTALLMODE=amu

Yet, I have 2 files (with .manifest extensions) not being updated while all other versioned and non-versioned files are.

What am I doing wrong?

Edit: I'll start a new thread for this question.