Install application remotely on Windows with the help of OCS Inventory

There are lots of applications or even we have different type of group policy to install application remotely. But throughout my experience, I found one application which is very helpful for different purposes along with remote installation.

Open Computers and Software Inventory Next Generation a.k.a OCS is a technical management solution of IT assets. It helps you to keep tracking all the information of workstation which are in domain. Even I am Windows geeks, I prefer you all  to install OCS server in Linux based operating system. For more information about OCS server installation, you can visit OCS wiki on http://www.ocsinventory-ng.org/en/.

Prerequisites:

• OCS server must be install
• PSTools with Psexec file( helps to execute processes remotely) should be in your local machine ( You can install PSTools from here !)
• Install OCS Inventory NG Agent Deployment Tools (Click this link if you want to download this tool)

1. Open your OCS Inventory NG Agent Deployment Tools in administrator mode:

2. Click on Options to provide the location of PSExec on your local machine as show below:

3. After providing location of PsExec tool, you can click on Windows Agent. After that, you need to provide the name or IP address of workstation on which you want to install

4. Now, the main area where we need to work out:

• Agent’s setup file: Provide the application which you want to install remotely. Here I have provided the location of Filezilla of my local machine. It is not necessary that your application should be in shared location.
• Other you can ignore it.
• In OCS Inventory NG Server URL: You need to provide the IP address and port number of your OCS server which you can access through web browser.
• Provide the command: /Now if you want to install silently in your remote workstation. Here commands may vary according to your package that you need to install. For example, if I need to install OCS Agent, here I normally provide /Server: (Server name), /Pnum: (Port number). You should have proper idea of implementation of your package before installing remotely.

5. After clicking next, it will ask your credentials. Provide proper domain name and your user name with password as:

6. Then, you can press start to deploy your application as shown in figure below.

It will try to install search your program files or program data to copy the install file and then it will begin to install.

Remember:

• In last, it will always say that deployment: success:0 and failed:1 . Even though, you can check application in remote whether it has been installed or not. I have done in my corporate network. It works very well.

• You can install .msi file from your GPO but for .exe this is best option in my view.

Thank you for reading my blog.

Your feedback, comment and questions are always welcome.

Regards,

Udhyan.