Category: 7898

Is Your Organization Suffering from Application Sprawl?

Time to go Shopping™ For a Typical ROI of Between 3-6 Months!

Join one of two webinars on Thursday 3^rd December and Tuesday 9^th December at 16.00 GMT to find out how 1E can help your organization reduce the overall cost of IT, increase operational efficiencies and foster greater energy savings through automation and software license control.

Register Here

More About Shopping™

Our self-service provisioning tool Shopping has a built-in application rental feature, which enables individual users to select the application they want when they want it. Expensive applications that are only needed for a short period of time can be temporarily deployed, providing your organization with significant license cost savings.  By eliminating the complexities of software provisioning and automating the request, approval, delivery and license control process, Shopping also dramatically reduces helpdesk support time.

What’s New with Shopping 3.1?

The key new features of version 3.1 include:

· Branch Office Administration – enabling delegation of administrative tasks so that app publication and approval can now be done either centrally or at a branch level, allowing organizations to save costs by delegating systems management control to branch administrators.

· Advanced Category Management – full Interactive directory integration allowing individual departments the right to restrict access to certain applications based upon the PC from which the request is being made

· Increased Platform Support – for a wider range of platforms including Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008

This new release of Shopping 3.1 also offers enhanced scalability and performance, multi-domain and Unicode support enabling application name and description displays in foreign language character sets such as Chinese and Japanese. Shopping is fully integrated with Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager and Active Directory.

Proven success

By deploying Shopping, our customer Peterborough City Council has seen cost savings in terms of money spent on support calls relating to the availability of new software for users. Similarly, Reed Elsevier* saw productivity savings when it gave individual users the freedom to select and install the authorized applications they wanted.

 

This model describes and illustrates the client deployment methods for Microsoft Office 2010. Deployment options include network share, Group Policy startup scripts, managed deployment, and virtualization.

Download details: Deployment Options for Office 2010

 

WPI is a simple to use automation program for the choice and installation of multiple programs, tweaks and scripts. No longer will you need a dozen CD's or more when doing a fresh Installation. No longer will you need multiple files when you are servicing another PC. With Windows Post-Install Wizard all that you will need is 1 or 2 CD\DVD's to fully install your PC with all of your apps, scripts, registry files or tweaks. Instead of having to re-download those apps like adobe reader, flash or updates to programs you can have them all on one disk. With WPI you can have all of them all on one disk and then have a nice interface for selecting which apps to install and after configured properly WPI will install all of them without any needed input from you. WPI also and is commonly used added to your windows installation disks. This way you can automate the complete process of Windows and program installations.

Welcome to the Windows Post-Install Wizard Website

 

What percentage of your Workstations and Servers have .Net 3.5 installed?

Participate here: myITforum.com : .NET 3.5 Deployment

 

Some of you might have noticed that after installing the .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1, there can be a leftover folder in the root of the system

Anything about IT » Blog Archive » Leftover files after .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 installation

 Installing Visual Studio on Vista

Visual Studio setup attempts to install .NET Framework 2.0 but fails if the 2.0 Framework is already installed on the machine. On a Vista machine, this will fail because the 2.0 Framework is already is built into the operating system.

To correct this issue you can edit the unattend .ini file to prevent VS unattended setup from attempting to install .NET Framework 2.0.

• Remove these lines: "gfn_mid framework", "gfn_mid framework ia64", and "gfn_mid framework amd64" from the following sections:
  [PreInstallOrder]
  [InstallOrder]
  [PostInstallOrder]
• Change “InstallActionInteger=5” to “InstallActionInteger=1” in the following sections:
  [gfn_mid framework]
  InstallActionInteger=1
  [gfn_mid framework ia64]
  InstallActionInteger=1
  [gfn_mid framework amd64]
  InstallActionInteger=1

Enterprise Network Deployment Readme

The Silverlight 3.x installation seems to be hijacking computers this week, showing up in update windows at the most inopportune times.  And, if you cancel the install, there’s no easy way to get the installation to start up again.

So…I finally found the actual download link to download Silverlight 3.x to your local computer for distributing in a more corporate, more civilized manner.

Click this link and the download will start:

http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/handlers/getsilverlight.ashx

To install silently, use:  silverlight.exe /q

NOTE: This upgrades the previously installed version without needing to uninstall it first.

You can also grab the .msi file from the silverlight.exe by running:  silverlight.exe /extract

Once extracted, you’ll find a silverlight.7z file.  This is a WinZip compatible (or other zipping app) file from which you can extract the silverlight.msp and other files.  For the .msi installation, though, you only need to retain the .msp and .msi files, i.e., you can discard the rest.

If you choose to go the .msi installation method, uninstall Silverlight 2.0 FIRST by running:

start /w msiexec.exe /X{89F4137D-6C26-4A84-BDB8-2E5A4BB71E00} /qn

Then, run the Silverlight 3.0 installation by running:

start /w msiexec /i silverlight.msi /update Silverlight.msp
ALLUSERS=2 /qn /LiV %temp%\Silverlight3.log

 

Extra Stuff:

Silverlight 3.0 .exe silent uninstall:  silverlight /qu

Silverlight 3.0 .msi silent uninstall:  start /w msiexec.exe /X{89F4137D-6C26-4A84-BDB8-2E5A4BB71E00} /qn

If you are using Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS) 2003 R2, you can import the Adobe Flash Player Catalog with the Inventory Tool for Custom Updates.

1. Start the Microsoft Custom Updates Publishing Tool.

2. Click Settings.

3. Choose the Import List tab and click Add.

4. In the Choose Path field, enter the location of the Adobe Flash Player catalog:
http://fpdownload.adobe.com/get/flashplayer/current/licensing/win/AdobeFlashPlayerCatalog.cab

5. In the Publisher field, enter "Adobe Systems, Inc."

6. In the Name field, enter "Adobe Flash Player Catalog."

7. Enter an optional description, if desired.

8. Click OK.

 

This download includes a Systems Management Server (SMS) 2003 package definition (.sms) for various versions and components of the 2007 Office release. A package definition file is a template that contains the SMS components necessary to create and distribute software. SMS 2003 uses SMS packages to distribute software such as the 2007 Office system.

The Deploying the 2007 Office release with Microsoft Systems Management Server 2003 R2 white paper provides detailed information for deploying the 2007 Office system with SMS.

Office 2007 SMS package definition file (.sms) – myITforum.com

 

Did you know that 64% of the time, IT organizations rely on the end users to register a complaint with the service desk about poor user experience? Explore how you can improve incident and problem management processes. This Forrester research paper, commissioned by Compuware, surveyed 389 global IT decision makers, some key findings include:

• IT is still taking a reactive, firefighting approach in its APM processes.
• IT lacks an understanding of the business impact of the issues, such as visibility into the end-users experience preventing them from assigning realistic priorities
• Even if the fault domain of issues can be identified, it is a challenge for most IT organizations to find the root cause.

Download this white paper to learn how to overcome these application performance management challenges.

Becoming Proactive in Application Performance Management