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GPO Software Deplotment

Hi,
i need some help in deploying some licence restricted software to a group of computers via GPO if possible.

I have created a security group for the list of computers and i have created the GPO and have added the software packages to the USER side of the GPO as i want the packages to published rather than assigned.

Looking at a test machine the packages are not displaying in the Add/Remove programs / Add New Programs menu.

Is what i'm trying to do possible?? I have a 2008 R2 Server with Win XP Pro SP3 machines, i already have a GPO in place for the 'Wait for network at startup' to correct a problem with XP and GPO deployment.

Anybody have any ideas?
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Vadim Rapp
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In GPMC, run Group Policy results for some user who is supposed to see it, and see if your policy is applied, and if package appears among the available programs. That's the first step; post the result, and we will go further.
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i've attached a screenshot of the GPO Results showing the policy did apply (Crick-Software).

I've added the computer accounts to the security group for this software distribution not the users as the licence for the software is very specific in that it can only be applied to a set number of machine.

1) If i add the user to the security group the software appears in add/remove, the user can then install software at their leisure but also means any other machine they log onto they could also load the software.
2) if i set the GPO to the COMPUTER CONFIG of the GPO the software installs correctly when the machine reboots, only problem here is with 30 users all being hit or a group of users it could impact on the wireless network.

so what i'm trying to attempt is Publish the software to a set of Computers rather than a set of Users.

Is this possible?

GPOa.jpg
No, you can't publish to computers. You can assign to computers, in which case it will be installed automatically; you can assign to users without installing, in which case it will be advertised, and later installed-on-demand if the user tries to launch it (provided that the installation package does support install-on-demand; most today's packages don't); you can assign to users with installing, in which case it's installed during user's logon; and you can publish to users, in which case they install from "add new programs". That's all.

If I faced this problem, I would create a custom action that would keep the number of installations in the database, and denied installation when the number of licenses is exceeded. Similar to what I did in the article "How to Report Result of Installation in Active Directory Deployment"  - the scripts would have to be modified by including incrementing the counter, and returning error code if counter is exceeded.
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Vadim Rapp
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Thanks vadimrapp1 i had a feeling this was going to be the case.

I am reading through your articles at the moment and maybe will have a go at implementing one of them intomy system.

Many thanks for your help.
After that article was published, there were some corrections/changes in the scripts, especially related to registering the rollback; if you hit difficulties - feel free to contact me, I will be glad to help. You will find contact info in my profile.