Systems Management

Hi all, I'm coming to a sad realization (cancel or allow). Um, I find this site to be an invaluable resource for my packaging work. However, I have noticed that a lot of the successful recipes provided by posters in the Package Knowledge Base (PKB) are written by persons who have a deployment mechanism up and above plain old GPO deployment. Meaning, they merely figure out what switches or properties to pass into the vendor's MSI or setup executable and then just set that up in SMS or whatever they have. More often than not, I'll use some of their findings when writing the MST to deploy with the vendor's MSI using a GPO. BUT, I find it really strange that so many of the success stories in the PKB are written by people who clearly don't grapple with having to distill every package down to just an MSI and an MST that can be used for GPO software deployment - ESPECIALLY given that this forum, "Group Policy" is far and away the busiest of the Distribution forums here. Maybe us poor GPO deployment folks don't meet with too much success?

I'd really like to see MSTs shared in the PKB (obviously stripped of Serial Numbers and company names, etc...). They're small, and it would help newer packagers see how perhaps other more experienced packagers made their MST.

Anyway, for the first time I've encountered an MSI that just aint gonna be GPO deployed... Nero 7. It's funny, because the PKB entry for Nero 7 cites "windows Installer with custom transform" as the most common solution used, when in fact not a single one of the posters actually made a transform - they all outline how to do scripted installs to pass to a GPO login script, or SMS, or ZenWorks. And after a few days trying to build an MST for Nero 7 with no success I finally contacted Nero, and indeed their techs said it's not intended to be possible, and they also couldn't find any account of someone having ever built an MST for it. (It's got to be possible, but beyond my capabilities)

I'd like to try one last thing: WIWW. I'd like to wrap their setup.exe (which includes an MSI) and define the switches and properties within the wrapper MSI. But some of what I've read on WIWW indicates it can't be used to wrap something that is already an MSI. But I figure I'll give it a shot as I really don't want to resort to doing a scripted install and use the login script portion of a GPO to get Nero 7 to my users. Has anyone here successfully wrapped a vendor's (MSI based) setup.exe so as to still be able to use GPO software deployment? Does anyone know of a specific solid argument as to why not to do this?

Thanks for any responses...