Russ,
first of all, I understand your problem with Office being reinstalled causing
trouble, but remember that if you do not install Office on all your computers
where you want it to run with GP, the computer that you leave out will not be
managed, so if you later on want to apply an Office Service pack as an .msp
file, uninstall etc you will have the same problem all over again having handle
these computers separately. But maybe the problems you are talking about are so
severe that it is impossible to reinstall and the fix the problems aftwards.
Also another problem is the actual way of making GP determine if it should
apply the GPO or not, even if you run a XP/2003 shop and have the possibility
to use WMI filters. There is no way, as I know of, that makes it possible to
figure out if a WMI instance is NOT present (e.g. Office is not installed) for
WMI classes that can have multiple values using only WQL. It would be possible
to check if Office is installed by using a WMI filter that looks something like
this:
SELECT * FROM Win32_Product WHERE IdentifyingNumber =
'{90110409-6000-11D3-8CFE-0150048383C9}'
But figuring out if it is NOT installed is not possible since for example
changing the "=" to "!=" would result in all applications NOT being Office 2003
being returned and the GPO would be applied, regardless if Office is installed
or not, and WQL does not support the types of operators that would make this
possible in for example normal SQL, and since you can only add WQL statements
and not blocks of scripts to the WMI filter, negating the entire result is not
possible either.
So my advice would be, if you do not want to install on all computers, to
create a small script that you could run from the startup script
(synchronously) that verifies if Office 2003 is installed and then set a System
variable, that you create, to true if it is not already installed. Then it is
easy to use a WMI filter that looks something like this (depending on the name
and value you select for the variable)
SELECT * FROM Win32_Environment WHERE Name = 'Office2003NotInstalled' AND
VariableValue = 'True'
This would make the GPO apply on the computers where Office 2003 is not
installed as you wanted.
Of course if you run W2K on your clients, this will not work :( and you will
need to figure something else out, perhaps install it from the Startup script
where you check if it is installed with for example WMI and the install if it
is not already installed.
Happy hunting...
Thorbj�rn Sj�vold
Special Operations Software
www.specopssoft.com
thorbjorn.sjovold a t specopssoft.com
Specops Deploy,
Takes Group Policy Based Software Deployment to the next level
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Rimmerman, Russ
Sent: Tuesday, January 25, 2005 1:38 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [ActiveDir] Office deployments via GPO
We have many desktops that we want to deploy Office 2003 to, and some of them
already have Office 2003. Seperating which ones do and don't would be
difficult, so we want to apply the GPO to a whole list of computers and let it
deploy. The problem is, if they already have Office 2003 on the workstations,
it deploys over top of it anyway, and this could cause Outlook or some other
issues. Is there any way to get the GPO to detect if O2K3 is already installed
and skip deployment if so?
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