FWeston
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Best practices for updating Lync 2010
My company is getting ready to deploy Lync 2010 as part of our migration to Office 365. We presently only have Lync deployed to IT staff, and during the evaluation period we noticed some issues that MS say require us to update to the latest version. I was able to download the latest version and install it on my computer from the 365 website, however I am trying to figure out how I can deploy this to other computers.
There does not appear to be an MSI installer available, so I can't push the install with a GPO, it also does not appear that I can publish updates to WSUS (there is a kb article with an update on MS' website, but it doesn't show up in WSUS even though I have Office 2010 selected as a category to sync), and there doesn't seem to be any kind of automatic update functionality built into Lync itself (like Firefox, Skype, iTunes and a lot of other softwares).
The only files MS make available on the 365 website are EXE files. I contacted 365 support and their response was basically "sorry, helping you update software in a manner other than downloading and installing EXE files isn't our job".
I know there are packages out there that can generate MSI files from pretty much any type of installer, but I'm guessing there has to be a recommended method for handling this situation. I asked the 365 support guy how I should go about updating Lync if I had it installed on 500 systems, but his answer was to manually run the EXE on every system.
I'm hoping someone can provide a better solution.
There does not appear to be an MSI installer available, so I can't push the install with a GPO, it also does not appear that I can publish updates to WSUS (there is a kb article with an update on MS' website, but it doesn't show up in WSUS even though I have Office 2010 selected as a category to sync), and there doesn't seem to be any kind of automatic update functionality built into Lync itself (like Firefox, Skype, iTunes and a lot of other softwares).
The only files MS make available on the 365 website are EXE files. I contacted 365 support and their response was basically "sorry, helping you update software in a manner other than downloading and installing EXE files isn't our job".
I know there are packages out there that can generate MSI files from pretty much any type of installer, but I'm guessing there has to be a recommended method for handling this situation. I asked the 365 support guy how I should go about updating Lync if I had it installed on 500 systems, but his answer was to manually run the EXE on every system.
I'm hoping someone can provide a better solution.
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right, I am not sure. But here is a thought to be taken with a grain of skepticism :-) Microsoft has been promising for quite a while now that the Lync Clients will be updateable through Microsoft Update for quite som time. IF you are lucky, they may have achieved this seemingly difficult feat before you need to do another mass update. My guess is that there probably is some creative scripting to uninstall the original and reinstall the new one, but it would ahve to be thoroughly tested.
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