SMS Application Installation Order

[leakes]

Hi Guys

In the environment I am in they are using SMS 2003 for Software installation and BigFix for patching, (don't ask!). On building a workstation I would like SMS to install all the other applications and then install the BigFix client last, which will in turn start patching the newly built machine.

I know you can make dependencies of packages in SMS that will not work for this scenario as it must install last, no matter what applications are created in the future.

It seems there are lots of ways of controlling priority for WAN related traffic, e.g. priority of sending packages to DP's etc, but nothing obvious for saying the order of installing the apps to the desktop ?

Does anyone have any ideas on:
A) How to make one package always last to install ?
B) How the package installation sequence is controlled ?
(e.g. If there are 100 packages, what order do they hit the desktop in, is it the advertisement creation date ?)

Any help would be much appreciated.

Cheers
Shaun

 

[ncotton]

There is no Direct answer for question 2.
You could create a collection, based on the results of a software inventory (the rules for the collection would be dependend on software that you need installed before you run this "last" one) Then create your advertisement, advertise it to this "special" collection, and set it to run once per client. This way it will only run once, and only on machines that meet the collection criteria. This would be the easiest way to do it.

Hope this Helps.

Neil J Cotton
njc Information Systems
Systems Consultant