Software Deployment

Are you talking about a package in SMS or an actual software package as in an msi or exe? Are you looking for a start-to-finish walkthrough of how to deploy with sms, or are you just looking for information on packaging your apps?


Assuming your refering to packaging your apps...

If you have SMS then you can download and install SMSInstaller from microsoft free. Its basically an ultra simplified packaging tool. It works on the same basis as Wise or Install shield. Basically start a capture, perform an installation, end the capture, and SMSInstaller will capture the differences and compile them into an MSI. If you're looking to drop some cash, pick up Wise for Windows Installer.

This site is probably the best resource I've found for application packaging. You'd do well to read up on SMS and Windows Installer.


In the mean time, post any more questions you have in SMS and I can give you some guidance.

Bladerun many thanks for your help, its really refreshing to find someone who knows what they are doing and willing to help.

I will go a download a copy of SMSInstaller and have a look at it.

Well i have sms installed out of the box and have done no configuration to it yet. What i am looking for is some instructions on how to configure sms + setit up to push out applications.

Any help you can give me would be fantastic.

Well, I'll tell you up front that I've never performed the actual base install of SMS. However, I can give you a general idea of what you'll need to establish, and the wizard should make the setup pretty obvious.

1) Designate a site server - This will be your central point of management for SMS which your mmc will access, and subsiquently will be where you SQL database is stored. Eventually once you have the SMS client installed on your client PC's, SMS will quiry all the clients for hardware and software information that will be stored in this database on the site server. You'll build collections by querying this database.

2) Designate your distribution point(s) - This is the server that clients will actually download software from. It is basically a repository of software packages. Most large environment have numerous distribution points, ours for example has 1 for each of our offices. In a testing environment, you'll probably have just 1, and yes, it is ok to make your site server also a distribution point.

Once these are established you'll need to get the SMS client on all of your testing PC's. You'll need to point it to your site server. From this point, you can set up a Hardware and Software scan from your sms management console, and with that information, you can begin to create collections of machines to install software to.


Remote Software deployments-

Here's the summarized version of how package deployment works. In SMS, for an application you'll create a Package. This package will contain both Programs and distribution point lists. Programs are where you'll specify the command line to run, the distribution point list specifies which DP's you want this package stored on. You'll created collections of machines based either a direct list of machines you create, or a query of the SQL database you write. For example you might query which machines have WINWORD.EXE on them (which machines has MS Word on them). You'll then create an advertisement to make programs available to all the machines in a collection.

The remote software install processes breaks down like this:

1) Package your application
2) Setup your Package in SMS
3) Setup a Program within your package
4) Specify which distribution points you want to store this application at in your package
5) Advertise the Program to a collection.

Your advertisement is where you will specify whether you want the software to be a push or pull.




Thats a high level summary, let me know what you'd like me to expand upon.

If you need a good reference to set up SMS 2003 is the Systems Management Server 2003 Administrator's Companion
from Microsoft covers site setup and planning quite well. It is not the end all be all but it will give you a good idea on how things work.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0735618887/qid=1106844112/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/104-3844838-6851151?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

BLADERUN

Hello mate, again thanks for your help.

Can i do this with SMS?

With ZEN we get it to send out WORD Template changes and also copy files from network drives to the local machine. Now we could do this with login scripts but we really dont want to.

Can i some how get SMS to send out templates as and when we need it to?

Sure it's possible to do that through scripted exe's that you push through SMS, though the process people at M$ would frown on it.