I am managering 21 licenses, installed on 30 machines. Prior to Sw
2004 I installed traditionally and when I accepted a SP I send out a mail. Then my colleagues would copy it from a server and installed it themselves. Some of the user are not daily users, they open SW to print a drawing and that's it. I usually install the SP on their machines. I hoped the windows installer in combination with the administrative image would help my day, but I do not think so.I have done some testing and this is my conclusion. Please fell free to comment them.
Using the administrative I can only install SolidWorks SP's. I Have to do some manually work with Edrawing, Help, Explorer and Viewer. Creating the image does not include Edrawing, only SolidWorks. If I update with a new SP and SW decides to withdraw the SP for some reason, I have to uninstall SW on 30 machines, delete my image and create a new image. If I install SW without image I can roll SW back to previous SP. If something happens to the image I am in trouble. I can open SW and work but I have to delete SW from the machines and to do this I have to get a tool from Microsoft that will clean up in my reg. base. Then I should be allowed to delete all folder and re-install.
If I should gain something I will put a bat file in my start group so SP's would install when the machine is started. But it took me roughly
15 min to install SP2. None of my colleagues will accept that. They shall decide when to update with a new SP.So the only thing I see I gain is I do not have to carry my CD's when I install SolidWorks.
Kind regards
Klaus Sabroe