How to prepare Google Adwords Editor for Enterprise deployment

Google Adwords Editor 9.7.1 again has been released with major design flaws, see Developers best practice for Windows user profiles. It saves itself, including Adwords data in Windows folder structures that are getting lost on a user logout. Additional to this, there is no way to redirect the data folder to a Roaming Profile folder like it's possible with Google Chrome.

The fundamental broken Windows basics are:

  • Roaming Profiles are not supported
    • As result - all data and the application itself get's lost if you log off from the computer.
    • This happens for the reason that the Application is installed to LocalAppDataFolder, what is a folder that is per definition a folder that is excluded from roaming.
  • Application is not installed for All Users
    • This is at least wrong design as Adwords should be used by 98% in Enterprises and not at home. The application need to be deployable per machine to be Enterprise ready.

How to workaround some of the issues?

VMware Player 4.0 MSI: Error 2732, Directory Management not initialized

If you'd like to deploy VMware Player in your Enterprise you need to extract the MSI setup from the standard setup. You need to download the normal VMware-player-4.0.1-528992.exe file from VMware site. Than just launch these installer .exe, wait until the setup shows the "Welcome to the installation wizard for VMware Player", but don't install the Player. While the setup is launched setup creates a folder in C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Temp\vmware_[random number]. Make a copy of this folder to your distribution share. Cancel the launched setup. Now you have the required MSI file vmware player.msi in the copied folder.

If you try to deploy VMware Player 4.0.0-471780 or 4.0.1-528992 to your Desktops via Active Directory you will expierence some major difficulties. At very first it's not possible to install at all. After some investigation it looks like very many others reported this bug in the VMware Community Forums, but nobody came up with a solution.

XMind - Mind Mapping MSI package for Enterprise deployment is available

This is a note for all others searching for a XMind - Mind Mapping version that can be deployed in Enterprise via Active Directory. I'm not a developer of XMind, but I've created a full-fledged per Machine MSI setup for the XMind Team to make XMind deployable via Active Directory. If you'd like to push it out to your users desktops - it's available now. No need to wrap suxxx NSIS installer into an MSI any longer.

It has been deployed to ~50 machines without any issues. I have not received any feedback from the XMind guys yet, but hope it will see the public light soon. If you need it before it get's officially published - drop me an email, please.

These are the setup features that have been implemented and can be enabled/disabled via transforms:

Notepad++ MSI package for Enterprise deployment is available

This is a note for all others searching for a Notepad++ version that can be deployed in Enterprise via Active Directory. I'm not a developer of Notepad++, but I've created a full-fledged per Machine MSI setup for the Notepad++ Team to make Notepad++ deployable via Active Directory. If you'd like to push it out to your users desktops - it's available now. No need to wrap suxxx NSIS installer into an MSI any longer.

It's currently under final testing, but has been deployed and upgraded since version 5.9.3 to ~50 machines without any issues. I'm currently in contact with the main developer about a few features and hope we can get this MSI version public soon. If you need it before it get's officially published - drop me an email, please.

Developers best practice for Windows user profiles

In best practice Enterprise environments, users have a home directory and the folders like AppData\Roaming and Documents will be redirected with Windows Policy named Folder Redirection to their home drive located on network. In AppData\Roaming folder very many applications are saving their user specific data and this allows a user to log on to any PC in your company with keeping all settings intact. The AppData\Roaming folder become larger over time and 300MB are very common in todays world. For performance reasons you should not copy this on every login/logout to the computer and back to the server. There is many banana software on the market from developers that are not aware of this technology. Notify them, this are bugs - no discussion.

It's best practice to enable the policy Delete Cached copies of roaming profiles that truncates a local user profile from disk to free up disk space after a user logs off a computer. With Windows 7 this stuff can be cached locally for some time, but the performance reasons are still the same.

Google Chrome now Ready for Business with Version 15? No!

With version 15 Google seems to have published the very first version of Google Chrome for Business that seems to work in an Enterprise environment with Roaming Profiles and redirected AppData folders. Yes - You have read correctly - they are at version 15 and this is the first version that may work. They claimed in december 2010 with Version 11 that Chrome is Ready for Business. The only thing that was ready - was a very limiting MSI wrapper that is not a full-fledged MSI setup. These version 11 was not ready for Business and the only important functionality was the installation to %ProgramFiles% folder, but this does not make Chrome ready. It's still only a suxxx MSI wrapper around the normal installer and as one example - it does not allow you to customize the icon folders.

How to integrate all language packs into Windows 7

If you'd like to add more languages or all languages to your Windows 7 deployment image this can be done by hand or with below script. This script requires some path configurations only and integrates all lp.cab files from the Microsoft Language Pack DVD.

Required:

  • Windows Automated Installation Kit (AIK)
  • Microsoft Windows 7 Enterprise DVD
  • Microsoft Windows 7 Language Pack DVD

Steps:

  1. Copy install.wim from Windows 7 DVD \sources\install.wim to local disk
  2. Configure path to language packs. This is folder named langpacks with subfolders named "ar-sa", "de-de" and so on.
  3. Configure all other paths
  4. Run the batch file to integrate all Language Packs (may take some hours/one day).
  5. Add this WMI file to your Windows Deployment Server (WDS).

Script:

PDFsam MSI package for Enterprise deployment is available

This is a note for all others searching for a PDFsam version that can be deployed in Enterprise via Active Directory. I'm not a member of the PDFsam team, but I've created a full-fledged per Machine MSI setup for them to make PDFsam deployable via Active Directory. If you'd like to push it out to your users desktops - it's available now. No need to wrap suxxx NSIS installer into an MSI any longer.

I have received feedback from the main developer that we will look into it for the next official version. I hope it can be published on the PDFsam project homepage soon. If you need it before it get's officially published - drop me an email, please.

These are the setup features that have been implemented and can be enabled/disabled via transforms:

FastStone Capture MSI package for Enterprise deployment is available

This is a note for all others searching for a FastStone Capture version that can be deployed in Enterprise via Active Directory. I'm not an employee of FastStone Soft, but I've created a full-fledged per Machine MSI setup for them to make FastStone Capture deployable via Active Directory. If you'd like to push it out to your users desktops - it's available now. No need to wrap suxxx NSIS installer into an MSI any longer.

It was me a pleasure to help these guys and they are currently doing their in-house testing, but as these guys have been proven to be are really open minded and thankful - I'm sure they are able to provide you the new MSI setup before it get's published on their site in future. I cannot publish the setup here as this is not Open Source.

How to create a MSI for deploying Fonts in Enterprise?

Like me you may need to deploy Fonts in your Enterpise network via Active Directory.

In past we have seen some tools on the net that made this Font installation an easy task, but all of them have faded away or have been commerialized with questionable feature lists in basic payed version. It took me an unacceptable hard time to find the way to go as the search results give tons of bad results and none of these tools around is really easy to use. I wished I would have found a GUI tool that works like drag and drop, browse registry and other stuff to create at least easy type setups, but this seems only to be a very big wish. After some weeks with MSI and WiX I understand more and more that such a tool cannot be easy - except it would be very limited in functionality and what is more worse than using 5 tools in a long term view? In a small world you may only need a Font installer, but later you need much more and it's better to learn MSI and WiX the hard way. You cannot get around if you need to deploy software in daily business.

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