Systems Management

Restrict the deployment to a group. You can use the Group Policy Modelling Wizard to "test" the target. Also, I'd avoid using product names for things like this. Use the Product Code instead.

Thanks for the reply!

I prefer not to use the group approach for the deployment, because I don't want to have to manage it going forward. Such as creating a group for the package, that means I have to manually add/remove objects from that group as necessary. I wanted to point that out, although I have a feeling you are talking about using a group for the testing purposes as well.

What I ended up doing was creating a testing OU, adding a few computers to it with mixed results. Some would meet the criteria, some wouldn't, and then I ran gpresult on each to see if the filtered policy would apply. I left it empty during testing, just so I could test the filtering. Once I verified the query was correct, I felt a little safer to proceed.

I don't really have a true domain I can use for testing, so testing OUs and filtering GPO's is all I can really work with. Group Policy Modeling seems very interesting, and I'll read up more on that.

I'm curious as to your statement around the Product Code instead of the product names. One thing I noticed during testing and research is that using product names, or at least my approach with wild cards, will install on a machine that has Office 2007 but web components for Office 2003 - such as the Powerpoint viewer 2003. I assume using product codes would avoid that. Are you referring to the GUID codes for each product in the registry? http://support.microsoft.com/kb/832672

Would you have an example of a query that I could look at, covering Office 2003 Basic and Office 2003 Professional?

Derek,

I'd persist with using groups, especially for testing. Once you're happy that everything works, you can simply use 'Authorised Users' as the target group. That covers users and computers, of course. Nice and easy...

Using Product Codes is probably safer than Product Names, as the GUIDs are unique. And yes, those are the GUIDs I meant, e.g. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\{90110409-6000-11D3-8CFE-0150048383C9} for Office Pro 2003. If you wanted to test for more than one product, use an 'AND' in the query.

I'm afraid I don't have any sample queries. My current client doesn't use WMI filters. In fact, I only stumbled on them answering a post in another AppDeploy forum http://itninja.com/question/ie7-wmi-filter