planning switch to MSI deployments when software already "ou

squeakstar · Guest

Hi chaps,
I've been working in this SMB for over a year which admittedly is about 5
times larger than the er, small business i worked for previously and one of
the things that excited me of working somewhere bigger were the idea that so
much of the place would be running automated processes for software installs
and having cool management systems going on but to be honest it feels like
this place is stuck in the NT 4 days.

The business has been kind enough to fund me some proper training though and
i'm an exam away from being an MCSA - yay. Anyhoo, i'm trying to drag this
place into the future, or more like today anyway. I'm going through and
writing a proposal on modernising this place, and one of the things i'm a
little concerned is dealing with the cross-over from fully manual
installations via sneaker-net, to creating MSI deployments and distributing
them from the server.

I'm after a bit of advice as to how best to manage this process. The types
of apps i'm wanting to deploy via MSI are those that are frequently updated
like Adobe Acrobat Reader and some specialist in-house apps.
Should i uninstall the software then pull machines into an OU set-up with
MSIs to deploy, or can the latest update be just churned out and over
existing installations?

Really keen to hear others opinions on how to go about this, and some
forewarning of pitfalls would be great.

Thanks everyone!

squeak squeak