I need a solution
We're a smaller shop that's still running DS 6.9 for our imaging/software deployment needs but also have SMP 7.1 collecting inventory and doing some patch stuff. We're getting ready to roll out Office 2013 to our users, and with our initial testing deploying it with a DS 6.9 job, we've found it can take anywhere between 20 minutes to an hour to uninstall the 2010 pieces and install 2013. (The upgrade doesn't go quite as smoothly, hence our need to uninstall/reinstall).
In DS 6.9 we’ve been doing this “on demand” via a job that does the following tasks:
- Kills all running Office 2010 processes on the machine
- Uninstalls Lync 2010 (msiexec)
- Uninstalls Office 2010 (calling the MS setup.exe bootstrapper with an uninstall config.xml)
- Installs Office 2013 (calling the MS setup.exe bootstrapper with an install config.xml)
The first two tasks run as local system, the latter two tasks run as our Altiris service acct which has access to the UNC paths of our Office 2010/2013 installers
Ideally, we’d give our users instructions on how to access the software portal and request the software when they know they have up to an hour free where they won't need to access Office software on their computer.
I was thinking a Managed SWD job enabled for the portal that chains together several “Run Script” tasks that are copy/pastes of my tasks from my DS 6.9 job. Throw a Run Script task at either end of those tasks to run with the user’s credentials that do a vbscript msgbox that says hey this is going to run as soon as you click OK, and another at the end to say OK it's done, now you can reboot.
Not sure if this is best practice or if I should be adding the install info to a command line via Manage > Software and do the actual 2013 install that way instead of a Run Script task that just calls the UNC share? I would think if Altiris handles copying things down locally it may help with my remote associates not having to stream all of that across the wire as the install is running, but I’m not sure how I would reference the xml file in the command line. My task in DS 6.9 is \\server\share\setup.exe /config \\server\share\configs\config.xml so I’m not sure if I’d just use relative path, i.e. setup.exe .\configs\config.xml or what.
We are also not using a Software Library if that makes a difference.
Thank you for any help you can provide!