Okay.
Now I'm on my server system or I have my Active Directory installed and my group policy objects and
I'm just going to kind of spin through the kind of basics around software deployment, software installation.
I've created a new GPO called Software Installation Policy.
So I'm going to go ahead and bring up the editor on this and just kind of show you how to get to the
software installation stuff.
So if you're going to be deploying per computer, then you'll go to the software installation node,
right click and choose new package.
And you'll be able to deploy up her computer assigned package if I go under user configuration.
Similar scenario.
I can go to software settings and software installation under user configuration, new package, and
I'll have the ability to choose a package that I want to install and have options on installing it,
which I'll show you in a little bit.
One thing I do want to mention in this demo is that there's some capabilities around the defaults that
you see when you're deploying a new package that you can set from within this UI.
And it's not altogether obvious.
A lot of people often miss it.
If I right click the software installation node and say Properties, what you'll see if I get my properties
dialog back is you can set a default package location.
In other words, if you have a server share out there where you want all your packages to reside, you
can set that and it will automatically browse to that when you're publishing or assigning a new package.
You can also ask it to prompt you for which of these you want to, by default, publish, assign or
advanced.
And in advanced it just gives you the ability to set all of the options instead of automatically just
publishing or assigning without any additional options.
You can go ahead and click advanced and you'll get into the advanced option.
And you can set the user interface options.
And I'll talk a lot about what this means in a little bit, but this essentially controls how verbose
the installation appears to the user.
If I click on to the advanced area here, you'll see I have a number of advanced options that I can
set, including the uninstall applications when they fall out of scope, including only information.
This is really old stuff related to com systems or com applications and fairly rarely used these days.
And then the behavior of 32 bit applications on 64 bit platforms so that those are options.
Again, what you're doing here is you're just setting the defaults for these values when you publish
a new or assign a new package.
File installations.
This one's kind of interesting.
Remember I mentioned install on first use?
Well, what I can do.
Let's say hypothetically, I have two applications that handle PDF files.
If PDF is one of the extensions that's available to me and I have two applications already published
in GPO, I can control which application will launch a PDF file.
Preferentially using this UI.
So if the user gets, for example, to PDF readers assigned to them, you can set which one launches
using this dialog.
So very much a corner case but very much supported in software installation.
And then finally, the categories option lets me define categories of applications so that I can group
applications when I publish them.
So this is only for per user publishing where the application appears in the ADD Remove programs, control
panel applet, and I'll show you that in a little bit.
But essentially, this is the way you can define these categories of application types.
And I defined one here called utilities.
I could also define one called productivity, and that that might be where I put office applications,
for example.
And those categories will can be assigned to the package when the package is deployed.
So that's kind of a quick run through of just getting into and finding your way around the software
installation.
Next, we'll talk about kind of the details of how you deploy a package.
And I'll dive in and give you a demo of that in a bit.