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Automating Software Deployment for the Small IT Shop, Part I
By: Greg Shields

"Next, Next, Finish." Hop over to the next desk. "Next, Next, Finish." Another hop to a third cubicle. "Next, Next, Finish." Lather, rinse, repeat.

If you're the IT professional in a small environment, you're probably familiar with this mind-numbing process. Getting software installed to computers across your environment is a maddeningly repetitive series of button clicking and "Are you sure?" responses. After a few dozen or hundred of these, you may be saying to yourself, "There's got to be a better way to do this."

There is, though you may have found that most of the tools and technologies for doing so are designed with the enterprise IT organization in mind. If you're a small IT shop with a few dozen or hundred machines and a tight budget, enterprise-scale tools are usually far outside your reach. You don't need comprehensive solutions and you might not even need ones that work 100% of the time. What you're looking for is a simple way to rapidly deploy new software and patches all across your environment without the need for hopping from machine to machine.

First and foremost, the complexities of automated software deployment can be a bit overwhelming for the newcomer. With little commonality between most software packages and their installation routines, simply figuring out how to do it can be difficult. But there are steps that you can follow to ease some of this process. Interested? Read on.

In this, the first of a two-part series on automating software installation in the small IT shop, we first need to discuss the process of repackaging a software installation. This process takes a standard "Next, Next, Finish" installation and reconfigures it to operate "silently." Software installations that have been reconfigured to run silent can then complete their tasks without any input from a user at the console of the computer.

Once a software installation is repackaged to run silently...

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