Software Deployment

[gob]

Hello All,

 

First of all big fan of the forum, stumbled across it a few days ago and have since been hooked. Also, hope I'm posting in right place, couldn't decide what this came under.

 

I work as an IT support technician in a few primary schools. I'm only in a few hours a week so mostly deal user problems and requests.

 

Every now and then a teacher requests for some software to be rolled out to a particular group of computers at which point I usually escalate it to another company the school has a yearly support contract with (they created and manage the network and its infrastructure) and they charge a small fee to carry out the installation.

 

Sometimes I feel like its a waste of the schools money and for me to do it manually to 20 machines is time consuming and would also end up wasting the school money. I really want to learn how do this myself, at least for the smaller and less important software installations (things like VLC for example). I don't suppose there are any guides on the forums to help me with this? I did search but wasn't having much luck.

 

Thanks

 

Gob

Edited June 18, 2013 by gob

[gob]

Just thought I'd quickly add I of course have full admin access to the servers and access to AD/GP etc. I am currently trying to learn how deploy software onto Windows XP machines from a windows 2003 server

[Steve21]

Without going into 3rd party software there's basically two options, normally depnding on what type of software it is.

 

If it comes with a .MSI you can do it through the generic group policies, there's one for installing software that's pretty basic options but give it an MSI, where to deploy etc and it'll go through it on startup.

 

If it's things like exe's the easiest way would be work out what switches you need to do an unattended installation e.g. no user interaction, then set those as a startup script that runs the .exe from a shared area etc.

 

Without newer server OS, or 3rd party software don't think you can really do exe's any other way. (Unless they'll run directly from a shared area)

 

Steve

[sted]

have a look at Home | ITNinja there is a lot of software sopecific info there on hoe to deploy software. But as above generalls its either use the msi as is, use something like orca and edit the msi, use something like orca and create an mst file to set uptions, use something like winstallle to create an install package or scripting. Different software responds differently but i prefer to use msi/mst where possible

[2097]

wpkg.org

 

i used it for 2 years , was great !

[gob]

Thanks for all the replies, been preparing for a trial run today, will post again tonight!