How to Create, Manage, and Deploy Applications in Microsoft SCCM (EXE and MSI Installs)

hi my name is Justin shelf and I'm the founder and run our engineering team here at patch my PC we develop a third-party patch management solution that integrates into Microsoft configuration manager proud of my current role I was also a premier field engineer at Microsoft supporting config manager in this video we're gonna be taking a look at applications and the different components that actually create an application so things like an application deployment type requirements dependencies superseded and there's quite a few different items that make up an application so in this video I just want to give a good general understanding to make sure you understand how applications work and how we can create applications for exe and MSI installers is going to be the goal of this video for me now if you've been following my content you may have noticed that I did do a deep dive into application deployment from a client-side perspective so I realized now that it probably would have made more sense to do the general overview of how to create manage and deploy them first so if you watch this video and you want a deeper look in and you haven't watched the deep dive from a client-side this might be a good follow-up video for you to check out alright so with that said let's go ahead and jump in we do have a lot of content to cover in this video so the first thing we're going to look at is creating a simple application so this is going to be using a MSI or Windows installer this is going to be the easiest I would say application that you can create and deploy within config manager because it can read a lot of the data required to detect whether that applications installed the installation command a lot of things are common when you're using a MSI installer so this is a Windows installer file type so if we go out and click on create application the first wizard that we're going to get here is whether we want to create a deployment type which is actually how an application gets installed so you can almost think of an application as just the metadata so what's the application name what's the version what's the vendor what's the icon that you want to use with it more of the generic things but the deployment type is actually how it gets installed so where's the content what's the command lines things like that ok so within this application page I'm going to go ahead and choose I want to create the deployment type so I've already pre downloaded some content for seven sips so we're gonna start by creating a 7-zip application now if I look here I've already downloaded the MSI we can see that I do have both editions here so I have the 32 and 64-bit installer for this so we're just gonna choose one of these since the initial application wizard will only provide as the ability to create one deployment type but we're gonna go through and create multiple different deployments one for 32-bit operating systems and one for 64-bit and we'll kind of review how we can do that ok so clicking next I can see that I get a notification saying the installer is not digitally signed so 7-zip is open-source it's pretty common for open source projects to not always code sign their installer files so I'm just gonna do ok and we'll ignore that for this product now the next screen is going to be the metadata about the application itself so what we're gonna do here is I'm going to pause the video and I'm just gonna fill in some of the metadata around this application alright so I just filled in some of the metadata like the name vendor version and description field here now we can see that since this is an MSI installer it did automatically give us the file name from that installer as well as /q so that's going to be a quiet installation for Windows installer so it pre filled in all the command lines that we need to install this now I am going to say that I want to install this under system context so that it would run for all users even if the user that initiates the installation within software Center is not a full administrator will still install under the system context and then optionally if you did want to append any additional commands for the install we can do that here so just as an example I'm gonna add the reboot equals really suppressed so that's gonna mean it's never going to reboot the device even if it gives a reboot exit code you can just have SCCM handle that in your deployment based on the return code as well as we're appending the log parameter for MSI so /l star V means for both logging and then the path where we want to save the log so we're going to do temp percent 10% 7-zip installed so that's gonna be under see windows temp since this is going to be installing under the system account on the device so that's just the optional if you wanted to add any additional windows installer logs if you're using an msi if you just left /q that would be perfectly fine as well okay so then we'll do next and that's going to create the application for us okay so let's go ahead and close that we can now see that we have our application showing up in the console now there are a few additional items that I want to add for the actual application or the metadata of the application the first thing I must say is that this can be installed using a task sequence in case you ever wanted to deploy that through a task sequence next we're going to go over to the application catalog and this is where we can add some additional filtering options and details that would be visible to the user within software center if they were to have this app as an available deployment for them so the first thing I might add here is a new category so we can see that I've already pre created a few of these so I'm gonna assign the 7-zip as a archiver category for compression so I'm and just go ahead and add that you can of course create new categories if you didn't have anything and you wanted to assign a category next I'm going to go ahead and add the documentation URL so if we go ahead and look at the user documentation you can either browse out to a specific file like if there was a help file or you could just paste in a URL that the user could open directly from Software Center if this were to be shown for the link text I'll just call this documentation and then optionally if you wanted to add the privacy URL for this application you could add that as well so for this I'll just paste out to the EULA for 7/7 now we can also add keywords these can be used to search within software Center for applications so I'm just gonna go ahead and copy this one so we're gonna add archiver 7-zip and zip that could be used as a keyword if the user were to search and then lastly the icon so this can actually be quite helpful it can make the end-user display within software center look quite nice so I'm gonna go ahead and add an icon file so there's a few ways that we can do this you can either browse out to a vendor website and download a I con file like a JPEG or PNG or we can actually extract the icon directly from an executable if you have an exe for that application so there's a few ways that we could do this if the Installer is a dot exe you can actually browse out and pull it from the Installer if that's relevant for the product the other thing is that you could browse out to a machine within the Program Files that has it already installed and you could extract the icon from an XD for that application so I'm just going to go ahead and choose one of these that have the 7-zip icon and then that's gonna allow me to extract that icon now when it extracts from the esc it might not be the highest resolution so you may want to pull it from a website if you want high quality images for example ok that looks good I think for what I wanted to add just this general metadata for this application so I'm going to go ahead and click OK for now and then if we come back to the application I'm gonna click on the deployment types tab at the bottom now if you remember we did browse out and choose a MSI installer when we created the application that was optional if you wanted to just create the metadata and then create the deployment types after we could have chosen that second radio box that says specify the deployment type information later now for this one we are going to rename that deployment type so when it creates the MSI deployment type it just gives it a generic name so I don't like the name for this since we're gonna have multiple I want to make sure that's very descriptive so I'm gonna just go ahead and paste in the name here and I'm going to name the deployment type just 7-zip the version name - MSI x64 and I think that's a bit better than what's just generically given when you create that from the MSI initially all right so jumping over to the content tab we can of course see it's pointing out to the path that we defined when we chose that MSI on the application creation the next option we're going to look at the command line so we can see the command line that we created when we did the wizard initially but we can also see since this is an MSI it also automatically gave us the uninstall command line using the product code that was detected within the MSI itself so that looks good for what we have here if we wanted to we could also allow the repair to be done so we could go ahead and browse out to the MSI file and that's going to give the windows installer code for it so let's go ahead and browse out and choose ok so if you allow your users to repair an application you could get the product code and it could do that locally now you can also provide the MSI so if it had to repair it from the cache you could also go ahead and browse out and choose where the repair program would be for that as well in our case we'll just leave this just the default for that and we'll just use the product code here but if you had like an exe installer that we'll cover and you wanted to add a repair command that's where you could run a program if you want it but just having the MSI repairing it based on the product code should work fine for us in this scenario alright so the next tab we're going to look at is the detection method so this is a big one this is how config manager is going to detect whether the application is installed so since applications are what we call a state based meaning that config manager can detect whether there or not we need to have some way to detect if that application is installed so msis are by far the easiest one to adhere because it can detect whether it's installed by reading the product code for that specific MSI file so that's why a lot of these things for MSI s can be automated when we browse out to that MSI and when we look at creating an exe install we'll see that we have to define a lot of these different attributes manually within the creation so that looks ok so we're just used to product code now one scenario that you might want to do is if you have a application that may get updated outside of SCCM you may want to add another condition here like if we click on add a new clause where maybe we browse out in point where the application is installed so I'm not sure if I actually have it here let's take a look let me see if it's on this Windows 10 device there you go so let's say we want to look out here and what browse out to a file and we'll say the version greater than or equal to and in this one we actually want to do 19.6 0 so the one installed on that remote machine was actually newer so what we could do in this scenario is do an or condition so what that means is that let's say that this initial deployment is for 7-zip version 18 point 6 if we only use the msi code if a newer version was installed it would not be detected as installed and it could potentially try to reinstall if it was a required deployment so if you had time and you wanted to add a or condition where you could do like greater than or equal to that may be a good idea for applications that are msi based ok so then going over to user experience we want to make sure it's installed for system whether or not a users logged in so we can see that looks good now you may want to change the max runtime so I'm gonna make it 15 that's the lowest number so 7-zip is so small if it's not installed by 15 minutes most likely you have some type of issue so then it's going to stop monitoring and close out of the installation so we're gonna set that as the max runtime for the estimated install time we're just gonna go ahead and put 1 minute in here for that restart behavior by default it's gonna be based on the return code of the install so 0 would be success 30 10 would be restart needed and then 1641 would be a restarts been initiated so if you want to just leave the defaults SEC M will determine whether a restart should be prompted based on the return code or if you want to always require restart there's a few different options here where you can configure how you want restarts to be handled within this install we're just gonna leave it based on the exit code all right so next we want to look at the requirement so these are things that have to be met in order for this application to be applicable or I should say this deployment type of the application to be applicable so since this is a 64-bit specific install what we're going to use here is a condition for the Opera system and we're gonna say that it needs to be 64-bit so I'm going to choose all windows 7 64 bit I'm going to do 8.1 64-bit and then Windows 10 64 bit now of course you could do server operating systems if you wanted just pretty much anything that would be applicable in our case it would be you know 64-bit operating systems would be required since this is a 64-bit install for this product so we're gonna make that a requirement so this would only be applicable and show up even if you deploy it to a collection that contains 32-bit machines this would never show up unless it's actually a 64-bit OS for the user or device that we're targeting the application to return codes we're gonna just leave everything default here's where we can see some of those default return codes if you had any custom return codes that this installer would provide you could add those here if needed and then dependencies we'll look at this a little bit later on but there's no dependencies that we need for sevens in all right so that looks good so we have our 64-bit deployment type or our installer essentially as what that deployment type is now what we want to do within this same application we're going to right click and choose to create another deployment type so I'm gonna go ahead and choose that and we're gonna get the same type of wizard that we got before so for this one we're going to browse out and we're gonna point to the 32-bit version of this application now so we're just gonna browse out point to that MSI file and choose next here that's gonna go ahead and import some information I'm gonna go ahead and just copy the deployment type name that I want to use for the 32-bit there we go we'll install for system I'll copy that command line that I use for the reboot really suppress as well as the log file and then we'll do next here requirement so we can go ahead and add this directly in the wizard everyone here so I'm going to go ahead and do operating system and then we're just going to do the 32-bit version of those operating systems that we did previously and there we go so we'll do next here no dependencies and then next here so if we go ahead and look at this we can now see that we have two different deployment types we have the 64-bit one as well as the 32-bit one by default when a evaluation is happening to see if any deployment types for the application match it will go in the priority order so for example it would say is the 64-bit deployment type applicable if it's not it would then go to the the second priority which would be the 32-bit so if there are multiple deployment types that you're using that would meet the criteria the priority of those deployment types that you added would be presidents then it will look at those requirement rules to see if they actually meet so if we go ahead and look at this we can see that we'll just change a few things here so we'll do fifteen minutes and then one minute for the estimated detection method we can see that it's got the product code optionally if you wanted to add the file system or registry values as an or condition greater than or equal to we could certainly add that here as well I'm gonna go ahead and browse out and choose our repair code here and then apply okay I think that's good there is this option here for the install behavior if you wanted to search out and validate that no executables are running prior to the install and you can optionally close them out when you create your deployment so for example you could say 7z exe should not be running when this install takes place you could add that and if the file is running it would either prompt the user to close it depending on whether you choose to auto close or prompt so this feature might be helpful if you're aware of a application that could cause issues if it's in use but other than that I think we have everything filled out that we want for this 32-bit deployment type and we should be good to go here okay so I'm gonna go ahead and deploy this application so I'm going to choose deploy on it we're gonna do a user collection and I'm just gonna deploy this to all users so I've already set up discovery for my users if you haven't done that yet you can check out my second video the post configuration guide and that will cover how you can come your discovery for users and devices in our case we're just going to target this to all users and I'm going to distribute it to my all distribution point group within SCCM here I'm gonna leave it as an available installation so that means the user would actually have to force this within software Center if they wanted this product so it's going to be kind of a catalog and I'm gonna allow my users to browse out and see this application if you wanted to require an approval for the application you could enable that option and you can even set email addresses that would be notified whenever somebody requests for an approval before they could install it I'm going to leave just the defaults there I'm going to show only notifications for restarts in this scenario and I'm going to leave the defaults for alerts alright so next we're gonna look at creating a application for a product that uses an exe installer so this one's going to be a little bit more complex and time consuming just because we can't automatically pre-fill a lot of that detection information based on the MSI so what we're going to do we're gonna create a new application and then when we're using an exe installer we're going to choose to manually specify the application information so I'm gonna go ahead and choose next here and I'm just gonna fill out some of the metadata so we're gonna use notepad plus plus so I'm just gonna pause it while I fill this out okay so that looks good I'm gonna go ahead and click Next and now I'm going to go ahead and fill out the application catalog detail so I'm gonna classify this as a editor I'm gonna then paste in some of the details and we'll come back once I have this filled in alright so I filled in some of the metadata for the application catalog I'm going to choose next here and now this is where we can come in and create our deployment type so I'm going ahead and choose it to add a new deployment type so that's going to be where we point out to the Installer but for this time we can see that there's no built in deployment type for an exe so for example it's not an MSI it's not a PEX it's not any of these mobile application types so what we need to choose if we're using an exe or even if you have like a wrapper script like a PowerShell script that does your installs we need to choose a script installer in this scenario where it's not an MSI and it's an exe installer so we're gonna choose next here and then I'm going to fill in my deployment type name so this is going to be the 32-bit installer for notepad plus plus we're just going to configure the 32-bit version just because sometimes there's compatibility issues if you go with the full 64-bit and you're using external plugins so we're gonna just create a deployment type for the 32-bit version of notepad plus plus so I'm gonna go ahead and browse out to my content so I've already pre downloaded the notepad plus plus installer so if we go ahead and look here I'm going to choose that 32-bit version for the content and then ok on that all right so if we browse out to the install program I can go ahead and select the installer now what we need to know here is that for an exe you need to actually find out what the silent command line is so a lot of installers may use something like a forward slash s forward slash quiet for slash very silent but you need to figure out how you can actually deploy this silently so you can use the search engine of your choice so we've got both up here and then what I'm doing is just searching just a notepad plus plus site so I've got a site filter and then I just search for silent install so looking at the vendor site may be a good place to start if you don't find it there you could just remove that and just do a generic search for something like notepad plus plus silent install if I go ahead and look at the first result here we can see that you know this is one of their forums somebody was asking how we can do a quiet installation and it looks like notepad plus plus uses forward slash capital S so if we go ahead and browse out I'm gonna go ahead and just type that in for my silent command-line so you're just gonna have to determine this now some installers may allow you to run a forward slash question mark to determine what command lines are available so I believe FileZilla is one that we can run a forward slash question mark on so let me just go ahead and browse out here and just give you an example so it may be a good idea just to run this if you're not sure what the exe install command is you can see if the Installer provides a prompt for forward slash question it looks like 7-zip actually does not I think I was thinking of KeePass so let's go to KeePass we'll run a forward slash question mark on their installer and then we can see this is one that does give us command lines so we can see for a silent installation we can use for slash very silent as well as just quite a few additional options that you can configure within the installation for this exe installer alright so now for the uninstall command you will have to determine what the silent uninstall command is if you want to allow the option to uninstall this application now this is optional but it's probably a good idea if you can find it in our case we already know what it is so we're just pointing out to the Program Files now note this is pointing out directly to the 32-bit version and Program Files on a 64-bit OS so my whole lab environment is 64-bit so this should work perfectly fine but if you were installing this 32-bit version on a 32-bit OS the uninstall would most likely be here in just the normal Program Files so keep that in mind if you were in a multi architecture environment you may have to create like a script file that has a little bit more logic than just looking at a specific location for the uninstall command for example so we're just looking at the notepad install uninstall and then /s to make it quiet all right so this looks good now for the detection method this is where we need to get a little bit creative for exe s since it can't automatically create the detection method from reading the product code of an MSI for example you need to determine how we can actually find out if this application is installed on a device so what I'm going to do is on the server that I'm running I've actually already got notepad plus plus installed so we can actually browse out to the registry and I can show you where the information lives for notepad plus plus so if we look here under software so local machine software and then Microsoft Windows and then current version so let's see if we can get there really quick windows currentversion and then the uninstall tab this is going to be where installations generally get installed - and this is where Adam remove programs also installed - on a device so what we can see here is that it doesn't exist on the main HT local machine software Microsoft so what that means is if we look at this it's actually a 64-bit OS so if we want to see if there's a 32-bit application installed on a 64-bit OS it's going to be under the wild 64 32 node so if we look under there and then go to Microsoft and then windows currentversion uninstall now if you did have a 64-bit application that's a native 64-bit installer it would exist under the main Microsoft key and you wouldn't go to this redirected key but since I believe 7-zip or let's see notepad plus plus let's take a look here alright so here we go I found it i just had to reinstall it I think I must have removed it so in the uninstall key we can see that since notepad plus plus is an exe a lot of times you'll see that they use the same common registry key name for their install so what we can do here is we can look at this display version value within this registry key so I'm going to go ahead and choose on that key and then choose ok here now what we can see is that this one did append that 32-bit assistance it's a 32-bit install we're gonna want to remove that and then we're gonna want to check this box that says it's a 32-bit application on a 64-bit OS what that means is that if it's a 32-bit OS that will just natively search for the native hive but if it detects it's a 64-bit OS it will automatically append that while 6-4-3 to node so we want to take that out if you did browse to it on a 64-bit OS for a 32-bit app and then instead we want to choose this option here that it's a 32-bit app we're then gonna choose the version value and we're going to say the registry must be equal then or greater - so here we go greater than or equal to 7.6 6 and that's the version that will get installed with this exe installer so that's going to be the detection method that we use for this exe that we're using here now we can also do things like file so let's say you wanted to look at Program Files so we'll look at Program Files notepad plus plus and then we could look at the court executable here so let's do the version must be greater than or equal to and then the version that we currently detected on this device now since this is in fact a 32-bit application we can see that it automatically appended Program Files x86 so we should be able to remove program files here and then just choose this is a 32-bit application on 64-bit OS and that should be able to redirect it so it will only look at the main Program Files for 32-bit operating systems and then it would redirect to Program Files x86 for a 64-bit OS where this 32-bit app is installed let me actually do greater than or equal to must not to save that and then okay and you can see that I ordered these conditions so if the registry key exists or the file exists we're gonna say that this application is installed user experience we're going to install fourth the system context whether or not it users logged in we're gonna say the max run time is 15 minutes estimated install time is also just going to be a minute this is a very quick small install for notepad plus plus requirement since we want to allow this to install in 32 or 64-bit we can essentially leave that blank if you wanted to set it so it could only go on certain operating systems or certain memory limits you could certainly come in here and you could add different requirements based on that application but notepad plus plus is pretty lightweight and really shouldn't have too much with regards to requirements or dependencies here so we'll choose Next here and then closed do next and then next alright so we've got our application we've got our deployment type if I click on the application I think I've got pretty much everything filled out from that initial dialog I will check this box to allow it to be installed from attach sequence in case I wanted to deploy this during imaging we can see that we've got our icon and all our metadata put in here I think that should be good we've got our deployment type for the actual install and we should be good to go here so I'm going to go ahead and do the same thing here where I target this as available to all users so I'll pause it while I create this deployment just like we did with 7-zip okay next we're going to go ahead and create a application for Google Chrome this is also a MSI file so this should be pretty easy to create now I'm just going to go ahead and choose to manually specify the information and I'll show you how we could just create a generic application and then we can come back and create the deployment types later so we're gonna go ahead and just do Google Chrome I'm going to include the version file here and I'll pause it while I complete this metadata okay here we go I'm gonna choose next on this and then we're gonna fill in the metadata for the application catalog which is what users would see here as well alright so that looks good for my metadata we're doing next here we'll leave the deployment type empty and we'll create that after this so we go ahead and do closed we can see that we just have the generic application we don't even have any deployment types that we could actually deploy let's go ahead and do properties and let's take a look if we need to change anything after the fact so we're gonna allow our task sequence we can see that it looks like it may not actually allow me to set this until I create a deployment type that's set for system install so we'll come back to this setting everything else that looks good for our catalog deployment type so I can actually come in here we'll create the deployment type directly from this tab so for Chrome it does also have a 32 and 64-bit installation so if we come back to our installer here I've already pre downloaded this so we have the 64-bit MSI and I'll go ahead and browse out and do next here do next here I'm gonna just rename this to be the version name as well as MSI and 64-bit so we know which deployment type this is ok I'm also going to append that reboot really suppress as well as the log file command line and just take that seven out of there for Chrome install that looks good do next here requirement let's just say this needs to be a 64-bit OS since this is specific for 64-bit alright so I selected the 64-bit OS that I want to make this requirement for we'll do next here dependencies we'll leave that empty for now and then she's next there we go and I'm going to repeat this process for the 32-bit MSI for Chrome as well and we'll pause it while I complete that process alright so we have our two deployment types I should be able to come back in here and allow it to be installed through our cache sequence and then do OK on that alright so the next thing we're going to look at our dependencies so what I'm going to do is create another application and we're gonna create a new application for Flash Player for Google Chrome so I'm gonna go ahead and browse out and I've already pre downloaded the Flash Player MSI so the version that's applicable for Chrome is going to be Flash Player ppapi that's going to be the chrome edition of their installer for flash so I'm just going to go ahead and browse out to that MSI and choose next here we'll do next here let me just rename this to be a little bit more details here and I'll pause it while I complete this all right so I filled that in I also added my command line for reboot equal suppress as well as my log file for this MSI we'll do next here and then next here here we go we'll go ahead and check our cast sequence box and I'm just going to go ahead and fill in our metadata for our application catalog which is what the user will see here in software center alright so that looks good let's go ahead and look here I think we've got pretty much everything filled out I will rename this deployment type that we created let's do let's call that Flash Player for Chrome this isn't architecture specific so this will work on a 32 or 64-bit OS so I don't need to worry about including that just do - MSI though ok I think just about everything else should probably be good we can go ahead and add the repair code if we wanted here so let me just browse out to that MSI grab that code detection we'll just leave it for the Installer product code that should be okay for this whether or not a user's logged in this all looks good let's also do 15 minutes here expected install will do 3 that's for that requirements that all should be good and we are all set here and then I'll do okay on that all right so we're going to come back to Chrome and I'm going to go ahead and do properties of my application and then we're gonna click on the actually we want to go to deployment types within the application and I'm gonna go ahead and choose my 64-bit chrome MSI installer deployment type and then we're gonna click on dependencies so dependencies are things that would have to be installed prior to the application being installed that we're looking at for the deployment type so what we're gonna do in this scenario we're gonna say that we want to make sure that flash player for Chrome is installed as a dependency so this could be a lot of different scenarios I think dotnet would probably be the most common one where you may have to add that as a dependency for an application so I'm going to go ahead and choose that I want my Flash Player for Chrome to be my dependency for my Chrome 64-bit MSI so I'm gonna go ahead and choose that deployment type we created for the Flash plugin for Chrome and then do ok on that and set that as a dependency and then okay we can see we set auto install to yes that means that it's gonna automatically install it if it's not there if you didn't have this set to yes in the dependency was not installed it would just not attempt to install this because the requirements would not be met we'll also do flash x86 and then we're going to set the same dependency here for Flash Player so we're gonna say the 32-bit version of Chrome as well as the 64-bit deployment type all are going to be a dependency here actually no let me delete that I will do okay and then apply that for just the 30 or just the 64-bit deployment type of Chrome to set it on the 32-bit we need to go back into the 32-bit deployment type and then we'll add that dependency for a flash directly in that 32-bit MSI for the deployment type so we'll just do the same thing here we're going to point out the flash and then point to the flash MSI deployment type and then choose ok and add that as a dependency alright I think that looks good now I'm just going to go ahead and distribute the content for all these applications just to make sure that all the content is available for my clients when we attempt to install these I'm just gonna select all four of these apps that we made and then choose to distribute the content to all my distribution points using my group alright so we've already deployed a 7-zip and notepad plus plus so I'm going to go ahead and repeat that deployment and I'm gonna keep all users for my target collection and I'm gonna deploy Chrome as well as a Flash Player all right so those applications were all deployed now I did make one change on my deployment for notepad plus plus I am enabling the option that it requires approval in order for this to actually be installed on the device so if you require approval you're gonna get a notification that you need to approve it either in the console or if you enable the email address within your deployment you can get emailed about new application requests from your users so jumping over to one of my devices I'm going to go ahead and open up Software Center so since these are all available deployments that we did to a user collection we would actually have to initiate these through Software Center now we can of course make these required if you wanted to force these to install on your devices that you target as well now since we did do user deployments the classifications that we defined in the App Catalog are going to show up for any user deployments here so we could even filter by all these different options like archivers we can see 7-zip or depending on you know if you had a large catalog this could be quite helpful now the first one we're going to look at is 7-zip so this was pretty basic right this was just an MSI so I'm gonna go ahead and install this it should just initiate the install right away it doesn't require any approval now to actually review the application and installation it's going to be in the app enforce that log on the client side so this is where we can actually see the install taking place now in my deep dive video for applications we cover this in much more detail but here's where we can see the details about the MSI as well as the command lines that are being run so let's just do a quick look here we can see that it did in fact expand that command line for the log file for the temp directory and it put it in see Windows 10 so let's take a quick look and see if we can actually find that install for 7-zip so here's here's the actual verbose logging because we added that log parameter for MSI's for example so that looks like it worked perfectly fine here alright so let's go back and let's go ahead and initiate the installation for Chrome now what we're gonna see here is that since we had a dependency it's going to install both Chrome as well as the the Flash Player so here we go we can see that we have two items remaining if we actually look at this install progress so if we take a look at that app enforce log we can see that's gonna start initially by installing that dependency for Flash Player we can also see that it's creating the log file so if we look in see Windows temp we can find that Flash Player install file name that I defined in my log that all looks like it was successful and now we can see that it's running the chrome install and we can also validate that we included the log for chrome as well there we go chrome installed out log here's the MSI that we created for that as well it looks like that completed so if we come back here we can see that we have both 7-zip as well as google chrome installed now if we come back to our application and we look at notepad plus plus we can see that this one is requiring us to get approval because that was set within the deployment so let's go ahead and make a request and we can see that that was submitted now if I come back into my console I did not enable email notifications directly so this is just going to show up within my console we can see things about the user that requested this and I may go ahead and say I want to approve it now if you enabled emails you could approve these directly from that email as well cool so we'll get that approved and what we should notice here on the client side it will take a little bit but once that's approved we should see that we'll be able to install it now that it's been approved and this would automatically install as well once it detected that change but we can see that we can now force that to install directly here and then we can see that that's now complete now if I go ahead and refresh my registry let's go ahead and just take a look at what actually happened here so here's that notepad plus plus we can see that it is in fact on that Wow six for thirty-two note since it's a 32-bit app one is 64-bit OS and of course we can see that this is in fact what our detection method is using it's using that display a version that we defined here so that's why everything detected successfully for this exe installer and everything looks good for these three apps that we did alright so the next thing I want to look at is superseded in so what I'm going to do on the back end here I don't think there's any need to record this part but we're gonna create a new application just like we did for 7-zip version 18:06 but we're gonna create an application for the latest version which is 19.00 so I'll pause it while I create that application alright so we can now see that I've created a new application for the latest version of 7-zip version 1900 so we're gonna go ahead and click on that application and then do properties now from here we're going to click on this superseded in tab and what we're going to do we're going to supersede the previous version that we had an application for so I'm gonna go ahead and choose that version 18.0 six in the super students we can see the old deployment types in the old application and we can choose whether we want to replace them with new deployment types for that superseded ins so I'm going to say that I want to map my 64-bit MSI from my old version of the app deployment type to the new one and we're gonna do the same thing for the 32-bit deployment type now optionally we have this option where we can say that we want to trigger the uninstall of the previous deployment type if that was provided now in our case it's not required because sevens it will cleanly upgrade the previous MSI without having to run the uninstall command this could be like if you're doing a major version migration and maybe the upgrade doesn't auto remove previous versions or you want to migrate to a new product you could use the uninstall option to trigger the uninstall command of the previous applications deployment type that you've mapped in the event that you need to manually trigger that uninstall during the new version upgrade but I we shouldn't have to do that with 7-zip it will clean the upgrade so we'll do ok on that and we'll choose yes for that supersede ins next thing that we're going to do is go ahead and deploy this application to all users just like we did previously someone go to entries next we're gonna do all users here I've already distributed the content for this new version now here's the setting that will show up if we detect that this application has another application that's been superseded you're going to get this checkbox that says you want to automatically upgrade any superseded versions I'm going to choose YES on that what that means is that if a user installed a previous application it will automatically upgrade that application even if it's just an available deployment if you choose this option it will still perform the upgrade automatically and we can choose as soon as possible where it can upgrade the superseded version if you wanted to make it only upgrade after a certain date we can also configure that as well but I must say we want to make it upgrade right away I'll leave the default for notifications and then default for everything else and then choose close so there's a few things that we'll notice we can still see the previous application is still deployed to all users but since we said it as superseded and when we deployed the new application we're not going to show that previous one because we've set it so that it's not going to show the superseded application anymore in software center it would only show the latest version of that application so if we come back to our application here and look at that superseded in truehl we can see that we did not enable the option to show the previous version that superseded so in the event that you have a newer version that's super seeing an older one as long as you don't check this box only the newest version should be displayed in software center so this might take a second for policy to kick in but we can actually see that this is already only showing version 19 on this server now if we come back to our client let's take a quick look it probably hasn't picked up policy yet so I'll pause it and we'll wait to see if this one automatically upgrades because we chose that option here there we go so I can see the installation just automatically triggered for the new version after running a few policy cycles and we can now see that it's the upgraded and I didn't even have to manually trigger that because I enabled that checkbox we can of course see in the log file we can see the new msi taking place and if we refresh Adam remove programs what we should see here is that we have the latest version so here's version 19 and of course we have the other apps that we installed for Chrome flash as well as notepad plus plus 32-bit so that all looks good so jumping back to the server I think that that's really all I had to cover today so applications are a big topic there's a lot of areas that even in this video I wasn't able to cover so if you do have any questions please make sure to leave a comment in the comment sections below or leave a comment on the blog post that will be accompanying thank you for watching

Channel: Patch My PC

Views: 123,148

Keywords: SCCM Applications, Deploy Chrome in SCCM, SCCM Deploy Chrome, Flash Player SCCM, Create apps sccm, apps in ConfigMgr, sccm applications, how to create applications in sccm, 7-Zip SCCM App

Id: G4iyyq_UlDA

Length: 45min 14sec (2714 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 17 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/PatchMyPCTeam]

Overview

• In this video guide, we will be covering how to create, manage, and deploy applications in System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM). We will create applications for Notepad++, Google Chrome, Flash Player, and 7-Zip. This guide will cover both MSI and EXE based application creation and deployment. We also include the components of applications including deployment types, content, detection methods, requirements, supersedence, dependencies and more.

Topics in Video

• Creating an application for 7-Zip – https://youtu.be/G4iyyq_UlDA?t=70
• Adding OR condition for detection method for 7-Zip – x64 – MSI based deployment type for version >= for file/registry value – https://youtu.be/G4iyyq_UlDA?t=639
• Add requirements for 7-Zip – x64 – MSI based deployment type – https://youtu.be/G4iyyq_UlDA?t=784
• Creation x86 deployment type for the 7-Zip application – https://youtu.be/G4iyyq_UlDA?t=870
• Deploy the 7-Zip application to All Users collection – https://youtu.be/G4iyyq_UlDA?t=1047
• Creating an application for EXE based installer for Notepad++ – https://youtu.be/G4iyyq_UlDA?t=1119
• Finding the silent install commands for EXE installers – https://youtu.be/G4iyyq_UlDA?t=1250
• Creating a detection method for the EXE based install of Notepad++ using the DisplayVersion value of the Uninstall registry key – https://youtu.be/G4iyyq_UlDA?t=1419
• Create an application for Google Chrome x64 and x86 – https://youtu.be/G4iyyq_UlDA?t=1749
• Create Application for Adobe Flash Player PPAPI (Chrome) – https://youtu.be/G4iyyq_UlDA?t=1894
• Creation a dependency for Google Chrome to be dependent on Adobe Flash Player for Chrome to show how to create dependencies – https://youtu.be/y7w7hBSHShc?t=2013
• Create deployment that requires approval – https://youtu.be/G4iyyq_UlDA?t=2169
• Reviewing available applications in software center – https://youtu.be/G4iyyq_UlDA?t=2199
• Install 7-Zip and review MSI install progress in the appenforce.log – https://youtu.be/G4iyyq_UlDA?t=2227
• Install Google Chrome and review how the Flash Player dependency also installs – https://youtu.be/G4iyyq_UlDA?t=2285
• Request the Notepad++ install from software center the requires approval – https://youtu.be/G4iyyq_UlDA?t=2343
• Create an updated application for 7-Zip and configure supersedence – https://youtu.be/G4iyyq_UlDA?t=2439

[u/Hellman109]

Ahh contoso.local, Ive actually seen that on a production AD domain...

[u/quad2k]

Great Video Justin keep them coming

[u/the_star_lord]

Fantastic work, would have helped me on my secondment but will show the new guys this to make sure they are all caught up.

[u/Sum-of-all-fears]

Justin’s the man.

[u/phorkor]

Funny seeing this today. I'm smashing my head against my desk trying to figure out why required applications aren't installing during the maintenance window. Will take a look at your videos and see if anything helps.

[u/sielinth]

awesome, we had plans to test how deployment with approvals work

this will save time going through google haha

thank you!

[u/Export_User]

Excellent video as always Justin, your contributions are really appreciated :)

[u/Thrussst]

Regarding email app approval; The links provided in the message do not work if the site is in HTTP mode. I've gathered that the bindings need to be edited for the Default Web Site in IIS and a valid cert provided for https. There are a few certificates available to choose when I edit https. Should one of the existing certs be used or should a new one be generated? Will doing this manually have any effect on switching to HTTPS mode in the future?