RE: Legacy application installations

Hello Mike,

Thanks for the reply.

According to your description, your purpose is that you want to distribute
the arbortext.msi to thousands of computers instead of just using one copy
on the mapped driver.

Based on the further research, I find a better way to distribute the msi
file, just for your reference.

Analysis and Suggestion:
=========================

We may create a new Group Policy Object on the domain controller, and
configure Software installation to assign or to publish software to all the
computers (Computer Configuration\Software Settings\Software Installation)
within a domain. It is best practice to be able to deploy software based on
group membership. We can link the GPO to the domain level to deploy to all
the computers within the domain. In this way, there is no need for us to
write a script or map a driver.

For you convenience, I have list the general steps to configure the
software installation policy as follow.

General Steps:
===============

1. Create a software package folder as a distribution point

Please note:

If the application installation file resides on the local hard disk of the
server, please do not use a local path. Instead, use the UNC
path of the local computer to indicate the location of the installation
files. An example of UNC path takes the form like
\\servername\sharename\path\filename.msi.

2. Grant "Domain Computers" group with full control both share and NTFS
security permission on the software package folder.

3. Create a Group Policy object (GPO) for the customer application software
deployments.

Please refer to:

How to assign software to a specific group by using Group Policy in Windows
Server 2003
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324750

4. Deploy file from the shared distribution folder as machine-assigned
Group Policy (Computer Configuration\Software Settings\Software
Installation)

Please refer to:

How to assign software to a specific group by using Group Policy
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/302430

6. After the deployment of Group Policy, please run "gpupdate /force" on
both domain controller and clients to refresh the Group Policy.

7. You may reset the clients to wait for the processing of Group policy to
deploy the customer software.

For more detailed information, you may refer to:

How to use Windows Installer and Group Policy to deploy the VPModule.msi in
an Active Directory domain
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/887405

Hope it helps.

David Shen
Microsoft Online Partner Support

.

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