[Fusioninventory-user] Is there a MSI to initally push the agent out to win clients?

[Rob Townley]

On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 1:50 AM, Gonéri Le Bouder <goneri at rulezlan.org> wrote:
> 2010/8/4 Rob Townley <rob.townley at gmail.com>:
>> Is there a .MSI to do the initial push of the windows client to
>> windows operating systems using Active Directory.
>> Is the only option the scripts that run on startup? logon?
>
> Hi Rob,
>
> I've to admit I'm not a Windows admin so please be tolerant :). Can you explain
> why do you prefer MSI package.
>
> Best regards,
> --
>      Gonéri Le Bouder
>

i wish i wasn't a windows admin, but at least work lets me deploy Linux at will.

MSI is the evil anti-thesis to NSIS.

.MSI files are  Microsoft Installer format.  With a OCSagent-setup.MSI
installation program,
current MS Active Directory administrators would be much more likely to
deploy the agent because it can be seamlessly pushed out with a couple of
clicks to all 10,000 workstations at next bootup.   I push out
OpenOffice.msi and FrontMotionFirefox.msi
and their updates to all workstations by default using this.  But to
use ActiveDirectory to _push_ software,
the software must be packaged as a MSI.  So obviously, OCS / Fusion
can fill a major void.


What is a little trickier is configuring the default install, but not
too difficult and
there are options.
 1.) If sysadmin can use a default hostname for the server, then no
configuration is necessary.
 2.) Server 2008 uses XML for creating Group Policy Objects to
configure pushed out
Microsoft Installer Files so that a single MSI could be configured as
Group Policy Object.
 3.) Or the admin could make a Microsoft Installer Transformation
(MST) package to modify - which isn't
too hard either because it is really just the diff from the original MSI.

There are some tools listed close to the bottom of this wiki.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Installer

Tutorial on using WIX to create a MSI.  Does not need Visual Studio,
but does need
.NET Framework 2.0 and its Service Pack 1:
http://www.tramontana.co.hu/wix/

The bottom line is that providing a simple MSI agent, the userbase for
Fusion / OCS
would explode.