[Samba] distribute/deploy software to clients

[rruegner]

Hi Florian, this depends
on the variable ways software is packed in windows
and what you want from a deployment solution to do.
So writing a all featured solution would be
to much for a open source project i think.
Perhaps MS sometime will release a good
working solution themselves, then the way would be free
to clone this with open source, but i see no
solution comming up getting standart.
I know big companies in germany which do it with netinstall
which has very advanced features.
Nevertheless netinstall also need fundamental
knowledge of the application and the software you wanna to release.
In big companies you have not a real clean windows install
it is more a windows company client, patched with regs and stuff
the company needs , also this clients are diveded in groups
like managers, admins etc. so the permissions
are granulated very fine, who gets what,when and how.
So the deploy Admins know every second which was released to who on what 
and why. ( this is fundamental for licence Problems at expensive software )
Same goes to security updates, cause every stuff must be validated
first against all company involved software, so there are many companies
which havent done service pack 4  win 2000 yet for example, cause they arent
closed to test it with their sap client ( all examples here ).
At the end these companies have outsourced this whole stuff
to externals, so you have political problems, too.
Or which man in the department of a company is allowed to notice the 
admin to give one of the users permission to install that very
expensive superbooster.exe ( example ).
So you need a workflow/software-database involved.
So you see deploying is no ta easy thing done , if your net grows
bigger, it needs to be well thinked off.
Best Regards

Florian Effenberger schrieb:
> Hi Robert,
> 
> thanks for these links, I will check them out! I wonder that no one has 
> ever deployed a real good solution. We can fly to the moon, but we can't 
> install packages pre-configured automatically. What a mess... ;-)
> 
> Florian
>