Software Deployment

Try this link: http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/current/licensing/win/install_flash_player_10_active_x.msi
After installation writes version 10.0.32.18.

Thank you for the reply. I already have the .msi file, i was looking for some guidance on what settings need to be changed within the .msi in order to install for a user without admin rights.

If you have removed the 'AdminUser' LaunchCondition entry in your transform, the only logical conclusion is that the transform isn't being applied.

Take a verbose log of the install and check the TRANSFORMS property. I'm willing to bet it won't include your transform.

Are you installing the application using the local System Account and not as the logged on user? I believe SMS, be default, will use this account and thus have all the elevated rights needed to install flash. I don't recall whether Flash needed to be installed as the logged on user or not, but worth a shot checking.

- J

Re: post #3 - You are using a transform to apply your changes, right? Editing vendor-supplied MSIs is a Really Bad Idea. Always use a transform.

I have always deployed flash player to the machine context, not to the user context, and have had no issues doing so. It sounds like your SMS program is attempting to deploy to the user context, and is thus failing because of the lack of rights.

To deploy to the system account, open the properties of your program, click over to the environment tab, and set "Whether or not a user is logged in" in the Program can Run dropdown box. Make sure "Run with administrative rights" and no other boxes are checked.

Once you've verified this, you can see what context the program is running in by looking at the execmgr log files on the client in question. Go to %windows%\system32\ccm\logs on a client machine that you've run the advertisement on, open execmgr.log, and look for a "Raising Event" line, later in the entry it should contain the AdvertisementId and PackageName lines that match your Package and advertisement ID's. Check the UserContext value here, it should report "NT AUTHORITY\\SYSTEM" if it's correctly running in the admin context. If it's reporting another value, let us know.

It's working now and thank you to all for that..It was a combination of all your suggestions that helped me work through it.
I'll breakdown how i got started, where i got stuck, how i troubleshot, and how it's working now... maybe it can help someone.

1)My first SMS packet was just the msi, no transform. The settings were exactly as Jsaylor stated... "whether or not a user is logged in" and "run with administrative rights". This worked, like i said, ONLY when a user with admin rights was logged in, or when there were NO users logged in at all. This SMS packet DID NOT work when a "regular user" without any administrative privileges was logged in.

2)So i created a transform .mst file by removing the "AdminUser" properties of "Launch Conditions" within the .msi file.

3)I started testing the .msi file along with the .mst 'locally' from the desktop and NOT via SMS. I figured if the transform is working locally, it should also work from SMS.. So this is where i got stuck. For some reason, when I ran a .cmd file with the following line:
start /wait msiexec /i install_flash_player_10_active_x.msi TRANSFORMS=install_flash_player_10_active_x.mst /qn /norestart /lv fp10_ax.log
...
it would not install. Looking at the log files as VBScab suggested, i did see my TRANSFORM getting referenced, but i wasn't exactly sure where to look within the log file to see if the 'AdminUser' 'Launch Condition' settings was getting ignored or not..but obviously it was since my install wasn't working.

4)After reading the suggestions from jcarri06 and Jsaylor, i went back to SMS with the same .msi and .mst transform file. Using the same settings as I stated in step 1, i tested it and it worked when a 'regular user' was logged in!!

My point is, that the .msi and .mst did NOT work locally on the desktop, but they did when i ran install from SMS. I know i could try to go deeper and try to figure out why it's not working locally, but my main concern was to be able to deploy this via SMS no matter who's logged on, and it's working that way, so i'm happy. Thank you again to all.