[SOLVED] Rolling Connector Out to Users

[Mike Oliveri]

Does anyone know of an easier way to roll the Outlook Connector out to users than having them run it? The major problem I'm running into for our students is they're attempting to run the msi file but are running into permissions problems writing a dll to a folder in the C:\Program Files\Common Files directory tree. I tried elevating the students to Power Users on those machines but still no luck, and I'd really rather not make students Administrators on our lab machines.

Has anyone found a better way to handle this?

Mike

[jholder]

Have you tried a login script for the domain? If your students are grouped into a user group, then you can specify specific login scripts for those users.

Then you can have the script run the installer using the "runas" command. For me, I just created a dummy admin, and put it in the runas, that way users didn'tget my admin pw.

I also created a script to log who logs into the domain. That way, I could tell if anyone was using that un/pw.

Kind of complicated. Another method might be to use remote installation services, but that only works on nt based machines.

[Mike Oliveri]

I may have to look into a runas option the kids can maybe run by hand. Thanks for the tip. We only need to do this in one lab for kids in certain classes, so I didn't want to mess with rolling it out to large groups via Active Directory.

Windows is always such a PITA with this kind of thing...

Mike

[jholder]

Originally Posted by Mike Oliveri

I may have to look into a runas option the kids can maybe run by hand. Thanks for the tip. We only need to do this in one lab for kids in certain classes, so I didn't want to mess with rolling it out to large groups via Active Directory.

Windows is always such a PITA with this kind of thing...

Mike

Yep. I was an admin for a school district for 6 years. I 100% understand.

How about Norton Ghost? They have features now where you can roll out images over the network. I did 2 labs at the same time in about 30 min.

The only problem was they all had the same names. That takes longer.

john

[Mike Oliveri]

They were already ghosted over the summer.

Here's a question -- does each user have to run the connector on their own profile, or does it only need to be run once per machine?