I had a customer in need of truly instant gratification related to a small software component. This trick will work in OpsMgr 2007 as well, but is not something I encourage.

Scenario:

Support engineer is required to uninstall and reinstall a small software component prone to failure on demand. In the past, this required the engineer to login as local administrator (users do not have local admin rights), uninstall, reinstall and logoff with the user waiting on the phone.

Given this has to be performed on demand, several times a week, using the normal software deployment functionality with the wuauclt /detectnow task really just did not meet support the need for instant gratification.

Workaround:

Create uninstall and installation tasks using the Windows Installer (msiexec), which provides well known command line parameters to silently install uninstall. This can can easily be accomplished using the msiexec -x (uninstall) and /qn (silent) flags.

As long as the package does not run beyond the task timeout limit specified when creating the task, it works well, and reports success or failure in the task window.

The Uninstall Task

Here's how you'd configure the task. Notice the software package is located on a network share with Everyone READ permissions. FYI- This was not the point from which the package was originally installed.

The Install Task

This looks much like the Uninstall Task, just minus the -x flag.

Hope you find this tip useful! Please post feedback via comments on this post

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Simon Skinner said on 7/2/2009 2:15:40 PM Pete, why is this something that you would not encourage in Ops Mgr? I have an example that is a bit long in explaination that is not to far of what you are doing here. I think this is an excellent post and just the tip of what could be done. Permalink   MadHatter said on 7/6/2009 10:50:24 AM Funny you should mention that. I have done this in Operations Manager 2007 (and MOM 2005) a few times when the situation warranted. OpsMgr tasks can be great for bridging gaps between monitoring and management. If you have a scenario where you have done this, it would be awesome if you would blog about it. Permalink   Subscribe to this entry's comments