Back to Contents  



INFO: Additional Tips for Enterprise Deployment

Posted: July 17, 2006

The CCL help file has step-by-step instructions to help administrators use Active Directory to deploy CCL throughout their site. Below are some additional tips to help with the process.

Important

Before attempting to deploy to your entire network, test the procedure in a non-production environment (or at a very minimum, partition a handful of non-mission-critical computers in their own Organizational Unit to test with). While deployment is intended to be simple, if snags do occur they can frequently escalate to complex problems.

Reboots Required

After instructing Group Policy to push CCL onto your machines, it may take a workstation up to 2 reboots until the software is installed. This behavior is due to an "optimized logon" feature in Windows, and will be noted as a warning in the Application event log for the machine.

DNS

You cannot use Group Policy to deploy software unless you first have a properly configued DNS server (capable of supporting Active Directory) for your domain. Make sure your workstations are pointing to the intended DNS server and not another DNS device (such as a router) on your network.

User Rights

While CCL does not require users to be part of the domain-level Administrators group, it was designed with the assumption that users have Administrative rights on their local machine. We recommend that your users have machine-level administrative priviledges before installing CCL.

If it is not viable to grant users Administrative rights on their machines, you should still be able to run CCL, providing you use build 3.0.1147 or later. If you run into problems while deploying or running CCL in this scenario, please check whether the problem is solved by temporarily adding the user to the Administrators group, and report this information to our tech support staff.

Note that some features in CCL may be unavailable if your network is locked down too tightly, or may require special configuration before use. For example, when error logging is enabled, CCL writes diagnostics information to the root directory (C:\) by default, and this will need to be changed to a location where users have write access.

Upgrades

To deploy a CCL upgrade:

  1. Copy the new CCLSetup.msi to your network share. We recommend you keep each build in its own subdirectory, e.g. "\\server\CCLInstallSource\3.0.1148".
  2. Create a new install package in Group Policy. We recommend you include the build number in the package name (e.g. "Install CCL 3.0.1148").
  3. In the properties for the package, click the Upgrades tab.
  4. Click Add, then select the old package(s).
  5. Select Package can upgrade over the existing package and press OK.

You can remove old builds from the Group Policy "Software Installation" list, as well as from your network share, once they are no longer installed on any computers in your network.

Troubleshooting

If you're having problems, be sure to check the event log on the workstations. As well, the following article may be helpful:

http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsServer/en/Library/dfe7b84d-8727-4561-9767-ccb47a5bf9ba1033.mspx?mfr=true