Software Installation by Group Policy
For a large software deployment, most IT departments do not have the staff or time
to install the software on each machine individually. In this article, I will
show you how you can configure a Group Policy to install the software on each
machine automatically from a central point.
Creating a Group Policy Object (GPO)
Creating a Software Installation Package
Checking your Software Installation Policy
What is Group Policy?
Group Policy is a huge topic.
I don’t consider myself an expert by any means with Group Policy and I have
been working with it for a few years already. For the purpose of this article,
you need to understand that Group Policy is a feature available in Windows XP,
Server 2000 and 2003 that allows you apply policies to computers and users in
your network. A group policy may be applied Site-wide, Domain-wide, or
Organization Unit (OU)-wide. In this article, we will be applying a Group
Policy Object (GPO) to an OU that I have already created.
Creating a Group Policy Object (GPO)
Creating a GPO is simple. All
you need to do is select your Organization Unit (in our case), right click on
it and choose Properties. From the Properties window, click on the Group Policy
tab and click the ‘New’ button, as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Creating a New GPO
Editing Your GPO
Editing your GPO is about as
easy as creating it. Note that you must be a member of the Administrators or
Domain Administrators group in order to edit a GPO. To edit your newly created
GPO, simply click the ‘Edit’ button.
Figure 2: Editing your GPO
Creating a Software Installation Package
Now that we have created our
GPO, we must define what goes in it. In this article, we will focus on creating
a Software Installation Package to make software deployment automated on
multiple clients.
Software Packages can be
Assigned or Published to either Computers or Users. You may use any combination
of the four, depending on your scenario. Let me give you a few examples:
- Assigned
to Computer: you are deploying
software to multiple clients and require the software to be installed on
all of the computers in the OU. - Assigned
to Users: the Users in your OU
require a special application to be installed on every computer that they
log on to. - Published
to Computer: there is an upgrade
(ie: Windows Media Player) that is optional to all computers in your OU
and can be installed if the user on that computer wishes. - Publish
to User: if the users in your OU
use multiple computers and you want them to have the option to have their
software with them, they can install any published package on any computer
they are on.
It is important to note that
only software that includes an MSI install package can be deployed via Group
Policy. If your software does not have an MSI installer, there are third-party
programs that will repackage your application into an MSI – I have yet to find
one I actually like and would recommend, though.
To create a new Software
Installation Package, you can navigate to the ‘Software Settings’ folder in
either the Computer Configuration or User Configuration, depending on your
deployment requirements. In our scenario, we will be publishing an application
to a user so under the User Configuration, we will click on ‘Software
Settings’. Next we right-click on ‘Software Installation’ and then ‘New’ and
‘Package’ on the menu
Related posts:
- From installation to Active Directory client with CentOS 4.2 – Part two This is the second part of an article I started...
- Getting wireless network working on CentOS 5 and Thinkpad T42 I pulled an old IBM Thinkpad T42 to use...
- Installing Microsoft Corefonts on CentOS 5 This is a thing I always have to google when...
- When you begin your Linux experience. I remember the first year I tried Linux, I was...
The comments are closed.