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Solution for Remote Software Deployment on Windows?
DownTownMT asks: "I work as a Windows administrator in a small company with roughly 180 WinXP/2000 and 30 Win98 machines. Our current method for installing Windows patches is WSUS which works great for the non-98 PC's. However, when installing software, such as Adobe, QuickTime and various other tools, our only method is to manually install it on each machine. What are you sysadmins using to deploy software across all of your machines?"
Spent several years using the Altiris Deployment Server product to install software packages in a ~4,000 user site. It worked quite well; you install the Altiris Client on each computer you want managed (there's an automated remote install, or it can be done manually, or via logon script, or whatever works for you), and then you can perform a ton of actions on the client computers from the Deployment Server console--installing packages, removing packages, power on (via Wake-on-LAN) and power off events, hardware & software inventory & reporting, all kinds of stuff. The packages you install will generally be MSIs, created yourself with something like Wise Package Studio or from regular off-the-shelf software with a transform of your own making applied post-install.
Microsoft's SMS is also a fine option and competes with Altiris; while Altiris comes with a lot more pre-configured features out of the box, SMS is just as extensible and has the same leg-up over Altiris that most MS products have over competitors--seamless integration into the host OS and domain.
A couple of cautions.
Any remote distribution product has a fairly high learning curve, and SMS is no exception. This is as much about the infrastructure as it is about the product being distributed. You will often find it necessary to hack apart MSIs, do some intriguing scripting, etc, because vendors are terrible at providing standardized ways of distributing their software in an automated scriptable manner. Adobe (as you mention them specifically), from what I've heard, is especially bad at this. That said, there are many, many people doing the same thing who are willing to share their experiences in mailing lists and on web sites.
Check the requirements and supported platforms for your product before you plunk down your company's cash. For SMS, that includes the service pack level as supportability can change. I'm looking specifically at your use of Windows 98, which I think is not supported in SMS 2003. But check and make sure.
By the way, skipping back to my first point...what duffbeer703 says about MS blaming issues on the 3rd party distribution tool is, in my experience, not as bad as it sounds. (Caveat: we have premier support so they tend to be a lot nicer to us.) But, in general, I've found MS to be pretty helpful on support, and that extends to "best efforts" even if they do point the finger at your other product. That said...remember your other third party product, even if you use SMS, is the products you're trying to distribute.
Good luck. SMS works really well for us, but we have a fairly solid grounding in it. As I mentioned, it's a steep learning curve no matter what product you choose, and you may find there are various system requirements that you might find onerous (do you run AD, for example?). Remember SMS is more than mere software distribution; it's also a huge inventory gatherer which adds to the complexity of running it.
You can configure and deploy Windows Installer packages in MSI format using Active Directory Group Policy Objects. We use them to enforce up-to-date SAV installations on all desktops in our domain, and plan to start rolling out more installs that way. Supposedly you can even use tools to bundle EXE serup programs in MSI files to deploy them through AD. Beats the heck out of administrative installs or VNC. Hope that helps. Cheers.
OCS Inventory is an OSS tool we had deployed once upon a time. I see the most recent version support application deployment.
Otherwise, if your Vista/XP/2000 machines are on a domain, you can deploy software though domain policies, though I didn't find a really clean way of doing that in the short time I did IT.
We were in the same boat a few years ago and went with Landesk. It has fully configurable patching of both Microsoft vulnerabilities, as well as dozens of other packages such as Firefox and Adobe. They take care of the core of our software patches and updates, and the rest are easily done with some custom packages. It runs about $60 per machine per year. You can't pay a minimum wage intern to manually patch machines for that little money. It also does full inventories including serial numbers for Windows, Linux, and Apple machines.
I've used SMS from Microsoft, and it works great for Microsoft stuff, OK for other deployments, but didn't deal with Apple or Linux at all.
I have a colleague that has worked with Altiris, and he liked it, but it was a bit more expensive per machine.
All in all, Landesk works very well for us and has saved us countless man-hours and effort to keep our network running.
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How about http://wpkg.org/? It covers Win98 through XP, works with all manner of installers (MSI, EXE, etc..), can run off a Windows or Linux server, and is completely open source. I set it up for one client who had a linux server with XP clients and we have had pretty good luck with it.
What you're really looking for is Systems Center Essentials. It is a combination of WSUS, SMS and MOM rolled up into one. It's targeted towards companies that have "a computer guy" or two, but not the resources to implement full-blown versions of SMS & MOM. It's currently offered as a release candidate, so its official release is coming soon. http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/sce/
I work for a company called Dexon Software (www.dexon.us) We've got a infrastructure management tool for network administrators. It's sold by modules, so you could buy Dexon Software Delivery along with Dexon Agent licences for each one of your PCs, it works on Win95 and up. I'm just a developer, but I know our prices are really competitive.