Use Group Policy To Deploy Applications In Windows Server 2003 Part II

Through the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) and group policies you can configure a Windows Server 2003 server to automatically distribute software to Windows clients by either assigning or publishing applications. Although the basics of this process are fairly straightforward, there are situations that will require you to use advanced publish and assign options.

For example, if you were installing Office XP onto a system that already had Office 2000, you would probably want Office XP to replace Office 2000 rather than keeping both versions. Advanced publish and assign options allow you to do this and more.

Part I of this article showed you how to get started by opening the Software Installation Properties sheet. Part I also introduced you to two tabs available from the properties sheet: the Deployment tab and the Upgrades tab.

Part II of this article introduces the remaining tabs: Categories, Modifications, and Security.

The Categories tab
The Categories tab allows you to select the categories in which the installation package should be included. By default, the Categories list will be empty because Windows doesn’t come with any existing categories.

You can create categories by right-clicking on the Software Installation container and selecting Properties from the resulting menu to open the container’s Properties sheet. You can then select the Properties sheet’s Categories tab and use the Add button to create categories.

The Modifications tab
The Modifications tab allows you to associate modification files with the installer package. Modification files allow you to create different custom installations for the same application. For example, you could configure different Microsoft Office installations for different departments. Some installations would include the entire Office suite while others would exclude certain applications, such as Access or PowerPoint.

Normally, you won’t have to worry about modification packages because they are rarely used. However, if you do choose to use modification packages, it’s absolutely critical that you apply them in the correct order. Windows tends to be very unforgiving when working with modification files. So it’s essential that you use the Move Up and Move Down buttons to arrange any modification files into the correct order before clicking OK.

The Security tab
The Security tab is where you can build a list of users and/or groups from the present domain and trusted domains.

You may then assign specific rights to each user or group based on which permissions you want them to have pertaining to the installer package. For example, by default, Authenticated Users have Read permissions to the package. Likewise, Domain Admins and the System have full rights to the package. These are usually all the permissions that you need, unless, of course, you wanted to deny permission to a user or group.

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