Microsoft SCCM Deployments, Tips, and Tricks for Experienced Users

[SIDE CONVERSATION]

PALANIVEL GNANASEKARAN: Hello, everyone. Good morning. Thanks for coming. So I am sure AU has been going great for you all so far. And I think last night party went well. We will try to keep our session interesting and valuable to you. I'm Palanivel Gnanasekaran. I'll be presenting the session with my colleague Christopher. In my 20 plus years at Autodesk, I have contributed to the quality of AutoCAD, Map 3D, Plan 3D, Product, and their STKs, and also Accounts Portal. The past two plus years, I'm leading that customer engagement efforts of the Delivery platform team, which is responsible for Autodesk desktop app and all installers of Autodesk products. OK.

KRISTOFER BARROS: Yeah, so welcome, everyone. My name is Christopher I'm the co-speaker here on this event. I'm also working at Autodesk, not as long as the PG. I've been working at AutoDesk for about 2 and 1/2 years. And I'm a software developer for engineering tasks. So I spent about one year on SCCM and deployments now. Before that, I was working mainly on ADA, I would say, download and delivery and product registrations and stuff like that.

PALANIVEL GNANASEKARAN: So the main focus of this presentation-- yes?

AUDIENCE: Is there any way you guys can turn your mics up a little bit?

KRISTOFER BARROS: I think they do it over there.

PALANIVEL GNANASEKARAN: Is it hard to hear? How about now?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

KRISTOFER BARROS: Is it better now?

PALANIVEL GNANASEKARAN: How about now? Sorry.

AUDIENCE: Speak with the enthusiasm that an SCCM advocate speaks with.

KRISTOFER BARROS: Right? Absolutely.

PALANIVEL GNANASEKARAN: So our main focus of this presentation today is going through the difficulties involved in deploying Autodesk products using SCCM and preventing the failures. We will touch on SCCM and SCCM packages, Autodesk products and updates, understanding deployment errors, understanding Autodesk product install configuration and dependencies.

So the picture depicts the steps involved in the process of deployment. Getting your Autodesk products, plugins, language packs, updates, et cetera from Autodesk, and setting up the license server are part of preparation. And a good understanding of the different SCCM deployment methods is important to choose the right matter to deploy, and then creating the deployment using Autodesk Deployment Wizard. These three steps are the prerequisites that must be completed before creating the package in SCCM and configuring it to deploy the products. The last step test is crucial to ensure your deployment is going to be successful.

So SCCM, the System Center Configuration Manager is a software suite. Sorry. It's a software suite provided by Microsoft. It allows users to manage software distribution to selected target systems and monitor them using remote processes. The most common deployment methods are package, application, and hybrid.

The package method is the simplest and straightforward way. It doesn't use detection of installed products. It can deploy to devices only. The application method is an advanced way of deployment. It uses dependency chains and detection methods of installed products and updates, and it can deploy software to clients and-- sorry-- devices and users as well. In the application method, the deployment is created using Autodesk Deployment Wizard. But SCCM application installs the product component by component. It is managed-- the installation of the product is managed by SCCM application.

The hybrid method is a combination of application method and a script installer. It has the benefits of application method, and, well, it avoids the complications involved in it. It can also use detection of installed products, and it can also deploy to users and devices.

So when we started preparing for this presentation, we wanted to have topics which are valuable and helpful to you when we go out of this presentation. So the biggest question in front of us was how to find those topics. So we created a mindmap . And this is a part of our mind map. We investigated the issues reported to Autodesk in the past two years by the Enterprise customers as well as non-Enterprise customers.

We reached out to the product support teams, gathered information from them, then we looked and investigated different forums which includes the Enterprise customers' data forum. And then we also reached out to some of you who were registered at the beginning of this class. And many of you have responded to my email. Thanks so much for the response, it was very valuable.

We've grouped all those items and chosen 15 to 20 out of them. the frequency of occurrence and the complexity of the issues were the criteria to select the topic. And then we repeated that process, as the picture indicates, to get to the top eight topics. So every topic represents one or more issues that have been faced in the field. We are going to go through those issues and show you how to manage them and prevent the failures. What is happening?

So the topics we are going to talk about are the product updates. This topic talks about different Autodesk updates as ASB Autodesk Standard by [INAUDIBLE], MSP Microsoft patch, MSA Microsoft installer, EXE, the executables, service packs, again another executable, and silent installation of those updates, the different updates, interpreting the errors and understanding their quirks.

This topic is about service packs. Service packs are updates released for Autodesk products 2017 and prior. Service packs are executables. There have been a lot of complaints or reports on this, how to manage deployment silently. So we will show you how to do that. Products and add-ons, SFX-- so Autodesk publishes products and add-ons in SFX format as well. So SFX is a self-extractable executable. The content of the product, the updates are packaged, compressed and-- sorry, compressed and packaged into an SFX format. So there are difficulties in the field to deploy them. We will show you how to handle that.

The next topic is compressed deployment. SCCM uses a Microsoft technology called bits, bits to transfer the files. What it does is it checks the network availability to transfer every file. So when we think about transferring 30,000, 40,000 files of Autodesk product contents, it's going to be a lot of time checking internet availability itself. So it impacts translating the data across the network. We will show you how to compress the content that needs to be deployed, and then unpack them on the client machines and install so that what we are trying to achieve is leveraging the SCCM feature of efficient transferring of larger files. We will show you how to do that.

BIM 360 Glue desktop is the next topic. This is one of the products which needs a prerequisite before installing the product. If that was not considered when the deployment was created, it's going to end up in a failure, deployment failure. We will show you how to manage that . Dark sites-- there are some products that try to install certain contents at the time of installation. If there is no active network, that installation is going to fail. That you will come to know when you install the product separately, not through the deployment. So we will show you how to manage that when deploying into the dark sites. Dark sites means the sites that doesn't have active network.

So what will happen is when the product installation tries to install and download the content, it wouldn't find the active network. And for the user, it would seem like the installation is stuck. And we know many, many customers have reported to us why it is happening, because they didn't realize it is trying to download some content. We will show you how to manage that.

Desktop icon-- desktop icons are handy to launch products. But if there are too many of them, it will be a cause for trouble just to identify which product is to launch. We'll show you how to prevent creating deployment-- creating desktop icon in deployment.

Uninstalling updates-- so in the product updates, I mentioned about different types of updates. Because of that, uninstalling updates centrally becomes a problem. So we have learned a lot of issues on that. We will show you how to handle that.

MSL dependencies, reboots, and rollbacks, this is important to understand the dependencies involved in installing a product and handling reboots and rollbacks while installing the products. This is required for those that wanted to use application methods-- the system application method for deployment. So we will touch upon some of the salient points in that topic.

So before going to the topics, I just wanted to mention that we can have one or two quick minutes of question and answer session after every topic. If you're having more questions, please save them. We will be available after the class at the lunch and also at the answer bar after lunch throughout the afternoon session. So you can find us at the answer bar. And we can discuss the discuss your questions. And if we know the answers, we can provide. If we don't know, we can go back and find and get back to you.

OK, in the previous slide, I showed you about nine topics. But in the mind map, I was talking about 15, 20 topics, right? So we found that these are the topics we could cover in this one hour presentation. But if you look at the handout we have provided, that contains solutions for more than 15 items and problems. And we have created the handout in such a manner that you can take it and use it. We have given detailed instructions, step by step instructions how to handle each problem and how to resolve them in the handout. And also we've provided scripts to support the handout steps in the class additional material link. You can find, download them, and use them. There are scripts there.

OK, this topic, Product Updates topic-- so now, we are going to talk about the service packs, different products. What is that? I'm sorry. Yeah, this topic is about learning different types of updates released by Autodesk and installed frameworks about MSA, add-ons, and handling Microsoft Visual Basics for applications. So this is a big topic. And I would like to hand it over to Mr. Christopher to continue on this topic.

KRISTOFER BARROS: Thank you, PG. So I'm going to talk a little bit about the update types, iOS releases. So Autodesk mainly releases three types of updates, formats. One is ASP, one is MSP, MSI. The ASP is Autodesk-specific. It's executable, which is a patch wrapper, and it can contain several MSP or MSI files.

In the handout, we have specified a lot of information about how to, for example, retrieve the parameters that can be used with ASP. It's also possible to extract the files are included in an ASP file. The MSP and MSI are Microsoft installers. So those will be using the Microsoft standard parameters. You can deploy all of these updates onto Autodesk products standalone. And in SCCM, you can create both packages and applications containing these updates and apply them to their target products.

The main issues that we've heard from customers are when they're trying to add them to product deployments. So there's two ways to add products mainly to Autodesk product deployment. One is using the-- when you used to install a framework, which is the Deployment Wizard that Autodesk has for products that support deployments. You would add them either in the Include Additional Software. And in the Include Additional Software portion, you need to expand a table. And then you can add any of these types of updates.

MSP updates are not supported standard, but there's a simple workaround that I will show you. So that's an easy way for you to go to Accounts Portal, download updates you need, create your product deployment, go to Include Additional Software, add the ASPs, MSPs, or MSIs that you want. And then when you finish the installer, for MSP you need to change some file names and do some setup I9 modifications. But it's pretty straightforward.

If you do that, then we will show you how to make sure that you, for example, get the styles installed with any of these types of updates. There's also another method which is using that application manager, which is a selection that you can do at the end of the deployment creation using the installed framework. That opens the Application Manager. And it will show you-- if you've entered a valid serial number, you will collect the contractor-suited updates, which you can add. If you don't have an added a serial number, you will only see the unrestricted updates.

So there's more detail on the parameters, but I don't feel like I want to talk about that right now. So instead, we've created videos for a lot of these topics, because it's easier to show you through a video how to handle these things. So we're going to create an Autodesk deployment with one ASP, one MSP, and one MSI just to show you the basics of how to create a silent install product and updates.

PALANIVEL GNANASEKARAN: Where is it?

KRISTOFER BARROS: It's in the videos folder.

PALANIVEL GNANASEKARAN: Yeah, I started running it.

KRISTOFER BARROS: Uh-huh, OK. Can you make that a little bigger?

PALANIVEL GNANASEKARAN: Let me. OK.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

PALANIVEL GNANASEKARAN: Is there one?

KRISTOFER BARROS: Corner, right corner, right?

AUDIENCE: The bottom right-hand corner.

KRISTOFER BARROS: Yeah, bottom right, that corner, there.

PALANIVEL GNANASEKARAN: Oh, OK. No, it's not working. Come on.

KRISTOFER BARROS: Yeah, minimize the last thing. And can you maximize that?

PALANIVEL GNANASEKARAN: Yeah, there we go. All right.

KRISTOFER BARROS: It's not only Autodesk parts that are complicated. Maybe. Do you want to--

PALANIVEL GNANASEKARAN: OK, let's just-- yeah?

AUDIENCE: While this is running--

PALANIVEL GNANASEKARAN: Pause.

AUDIENCE: Now is more a local drive? Or does this work differently on broad network computer launch? Because we, my company launches large scale networks. And is this more like a local source?

KRISTOFER BARROS: Yes, so this is creating the department source. So you would create the deployment source, add all the updates, and then this is what you've got to push to the distribution point. And that's going to go to the machines.

AUDIENCE: OK.

KRISTOFER BARROS: OK?

PALANIVEL GNANASEKARAN: It's not stopping.

KRISTOFER BARROS: No, it's fine we can continue. So here, I'm just adding the deployment configuration name.

PALANIVEL GNANASEKARAN: You paused it. Come on.

KRISTOFER BARROS: I think just use Space. OK, now, it's moving. All right. We accept the license agreement. We enter serial number. Yeah, so here's the included additional-- so here, one thing. You don't want the desktop app, just uncheck it there. Include additional software. Yeah, so we've downloaded this VBA MSI. We extracted it. And here, we are adding the MSI.

Yeah, it's going to see-- we can only see the SFX, EXE, and the AutoCAD executable, even though there's an MSP in there, because our framework doesn't support that by default. So here, first thing we add is the ASP.

PALANIVEL GNANASEKARAN: Sorry.

KRISTOFER BARROS: Yeah. It doesn't resolve the names, so just add a name for the 181.2 ASP. And then we do the MSP workaround. So I take an MSP, I just rename it to an executable. Now, it shows up. I add it. It doesn't resolve the name. So I'm going to call it what it is, ReCap. Let's pause again.

PALANIVEL GNANASEKARAN: Oh, and here it's working as well.

KRISTOFER BARROS: So here's the check. For ASP executables, you need to add a command line switch. Here, I used forward slash Q.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

KRISTOFER BARROS: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

KRISTOFER BARROS: Oh no, that's from the recorders. So now, we're going to go to the VBA module. I have extracted it. I go to x64. This is an AutoCAD article that describes this in detail, how to add it. It resolves automatically using MSI. The important thing is only add the command line switch for the ASP/Q. I don't add for the MSP or the MSI, because it's going to apply the command line switch that I add to the setup EXE command line parameter. So if I add Q to the setup EXE command line parameter, it's going to be using that. But for ASPs, you still need to add a forward slash Q to make it install silently. Here, we needed to add install directory parameter specifically for this VBA installer.

Once you're done, just close it and create the-- finish creating the deployment source.

PALANIVEL GNANASEKARAN: Done?

KRISTOFER BARROS: Yeah, you can fast forward if you think--

PALANIVEL GNANASEKARAN: I don't know.

KRISTOFER BARROS: Nothing next.

PALANIVEL GNANASEKARAN: The screen is not showing that.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] in Microsoft Office, and then using this tool to launch the newer versions of CAD or whatever. Does that solve a lot of the merging issues then? Because I know in 2016 and better, there's a lot of communication errors between those two programs in Office. So I know that '19 solves a lot of those issues. And then using this, does that merge and make those connections properly between the two programs?

KRISTOFER BARROS: So I'm not sure about that. That's part-specific. But for this, it's basically you're just adding different types of updates. And there's no difference really from applying them separately, but they get added to deployment, and then get applied at the end of the installation of the product.

AUDIENCE: OK, so this more forward thinking than jumping back and making those connections?

KRISTOFER BARROS: Yeah. Can you fast forward a little bit?

PALANIVEL GNANASEKARAN: No, it's not working.

KRISTOFER BARROS: But if you double-- maybe if you double click, you can get out of the full screen. Where's the video?

PALANIVEL GNANASEKARAN: The control window is not seen.

KRISTOFER BARROS: Oh, you have a better video player, man.

PALANIVEL GNANASEKARAN: Can you play it from your computer? That would be faster. Take this, take this.

KRISTOFER BARROS: Yeah, that's a good idea.

PALANIVEL GNANASEKARAN: Sorry, [INAUDIBLE]

KRISTOFER BARROS: All right, so let me open the video app.

PALANIVEL GNANASEKARAN: It's not working.

[INAUDIBLE]

Yeah, we have more topics.

AUDIENCE: It's OK.

KRISTOFER BARROS: Yeah, this works much better. Yeah, so now, we've created the deployment package. So what does this look like when we install this package? So this is AutoCAD, not '19. This is actually 2018, but I'm so used to testing 2019 products I'm just typing it. So this is the 2018 AutoCAD ASP, MSI, and MSP. So it's downloading. I'm going to fast forward, because we don't want to wait too much. 45%, installing. Now we see the desktop shortcuts show up. And here, we can see that all the components and updates were applied in Control Panel without any user interaction. So any questions?

AUDIENCE: What happens when you try to push AutoCAD updates that way? It's usually kind of arbitrary whether or not it actually applies the updates. Is there any magic trick to that? [INAUDIBLE]

KRISTOFER BARROS: Yeah, so the baseline is for ASP. Just use the silence switch if you want it to be silent, right? Non-user interactive, et cetera. For MSP, make sure you don't use the silent switch when you add them in include additional software, because they would fail if you have a silent switch on the setup EXE command line parameter as well. That's one of the common ways they fail.

AUDIENCE: So no QE?

KRISTOFER BARROS: Nothing in the--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

KRISTOFER BARROS: Sorry?

AUDIENCE: No MSI-exclusive switches?

KRISTOFER BARROS: Nothing in the-- none of those in the Include Additional Software, I would say, if you add them there. No, they will get applied from the Setup EXE command line parameter. So that's a common source of failure.

So the next topic, which is service packs--

PALANIVEL GNANASEKARAN: Yeah, you could go here. We have less time.

KRISTOFER BARROS: So service packs are the older types of updates. They don't support, for example, file extraction. So there's no way of extracting the files that are wrapped inside this format. And if you add the Q switch like I did here, it's still going to show you a pop-up here. So for those, the service packs, it's mainly to use forward slash S as the parameter. Then it will be completely hidden and silent. And that applies to the Include Additional Software as well to make sure to use the S on the service packs, to make them silent.

So the most common source of failure is adding the switches in Include Additional Software when they don't need to be there, and also like applying the wrong switches. For ASP, we can extract the content. And this is-- some customers do this when they want to apply just a specific MSP or MSI that's included or wrapped in this ASP. And they don't want to update anything else than Revit core, for example.

The other thing is if you have installation problems with updates, then you can actually extract the contents and see which of these files that are included here are causing the failures. So they extracted. You just go to the location of the update and type in the command line. Type forward slash E and then the folder to extract it. So the dot is just going to use the current folder. And here, it's going to ask you to modify the file. It works a little bit.

And if you look at the Downloads folder, it has a number. That's actually the update ID that the desktop app uses when it downloads updates to apply. So here, we see the extracted files.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

KRISTOFER BARROS: So generally, if they're later than 2017, they should be ASP. What I do is I just take the update, open the command line, forward slash question mark. If it pops you up with all the listed parameters, it's an ASP, right? If it doesn't, then OK, assume that it's an older update. But in general, I would recommend always testing updates locally and applying them locally to a product, just using command line and seeing if that works.

AUDIENCE: Two more questions.

KRISTOFER BARROS: Sure.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] And there was MSI in there, so it's not an update.

KRISTOFER BARROS: Yeah, so you were talking about SFX, am I correct? Self-extracting?

AUDIENCE: Online Revit has a lot of extra-- they do a lot of self-extraction. A lot of MSIs and MSPs are actually updating their patches like they're supposed to be. What is the reasoning that they're different than everyone else?

KRISTOFER BARROS: Because this is a different product team. That's all I can say, yeah.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

KRISTOFER BARROS: Yeah, go ahead.

AUDIENCE: So with the service packs, there's an issue with my program [INAUDIBLE] two versions in the service packs we've got to do that sequentially, right?

KRISTOFER BARROS: Yeah, that's another thing. That's also another source of common failures is that our updates, they can have dependent updates which you need to apply before. So there's a sequence that you need to apply the updates in. So it's important to look to release notes which update is the dependent update. Because if you try to apply the update and you don't have it include the dependent update applied before that, it's going to fail.

AUDIENCE: So is this advanced as far as being able to pull all of ours sequentially automatically when you update?

KRISTOFER BARROS: So ADA does that.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

KRISTOFER BARROS: Yeah, so you have to download them, look at the release notes, right? And then you have to apply them in order also. So you can change the order in Include Additional Software which update gets applied first. But I would also recommend using the ADA local on a machine, because it will show you beneath it. Like, I actually have ADA on my machine here, so I can show you. So you see here you can just expand here. So this is not a dependent update, actually. This is superseding. That's another thing. So this update supersedes that one. It includes that update. So you don't need to apply this one first. So if you apply this one, this one will disappear.

PALANIVEL GNANASEKARAN: It's OK, move on.

KRISTOFER BARROS: Yeah, I'm going to move on. So where are we now?

PALANIVEL GNANASEKARAN: Yeah, that one. Keep going, keep going.

KRISTOFER BARROS: Products and updates, SFX. So the objective here is self extracting files. So as we did in the previous example, I manually extracted VBA, Microsoft VBA. I took out the installer and added it to the install framework in the Product Depolyment Wizard. But some customers have been asking, we want to deploy one SFX file without user interaction. So that's actually possible. So I'm going to show you how you can do that using SCCM.

Again, I'm going to show you a video. So we go to Videos. I'm using DWG TrueView here as an example. So here, I've created an application in SCCM. We're looking at the properties. It's a script installer, location method, content location. Look at the actual content. Yeah, so I'm using this DWG TrueView script here. And now, I'm going to show you-- and there's more detail in all the handouts, in the handouts about all these things. But basically, I'm navigating to the TrueView.

Yeah, so here, it's pretty straightforward. First, you see the DWG TrueView 2019 SFX EXE. If you try running that, it will start extracting and asking the user for which folder you want to extract files to. So here's the command line parameter they can use. It's dash to press launch, dash C-- no, D actually. And the D stands for directory. So you need to add which directory. And I'm using C Autodesk, which is the default directory for SFX. And then the line below is just using, applying-- because it's a regular Autodesk product, so it needs the forward slash W to wait. Otherwise, it will give you a 2059 error, which is like exit code, basically. So it exits immediately. It will install successfully, but you will see an error in SCCM. So you need a W. And then the forward slash Q installs it silently.

So we can continue. I'm just going to show you this quickly. Yeah, here's the product code. I used data as a detection. And this is the uninstall script. I added the log file. User experience, install the system, whether user logged on or not, hidden. No dependencies, nothing, nothing special. We're just applying it to a device here. So I think this one is pretty quick actually, 20%, 30%, installing.

Now we should have the desktop shortcut show up. And there it is. So this is just an example to give you an idea of if you have an SFX file that extracts something and you want to install it, how to manage that in SCCM. It's pretty straightforward. So here's the uninstall log, just to mention a little bit about the logs. The key to debugging issues is looking at the logs and which log the error appeared in, and also looking at the exit codes. You have a question? Sorry?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

KRISTOFER BARROS: Yeah, I'll hurry up. OK, yeah. So I'm just going to quickly fast forward here and show you what it looks like. I changed the command line to show you what it looks like when it's extracting. OK, fast forward. Yeah, so this is the problem we're trying to solve. This is the pop-up that we need to hide. Otherwise, SCCM won't be able to install it. It's a simple pop-up, but that can ruin the entire installation.

OK, next topic. I'm going to speed up here. We're short on time. Compressed deployment-- yeah, as PG earlier mentioned, some customers have mentioned that it's much faster for them to deploy fewer but larger files, that file size is not important to them. And Autodesk products can have like 20,000 or 40,000 files. So I'm going to quickly show you how to-- give an example here of how to manage that. I'm just going to call it Zip Unzip.

Yeah, so here, I've created two applications. One is WinRAR. I'm using WinRAR in this case, command line WinRAR. And the reason with that is I need to set this as a dependency for the actual compressed deployment. So I'm compressing an entire Autodesk deployment together with updates and everything, setting a specific file size.

And in this case, I'm using 1,000 megabytes, a gigabyte. So it's going to split them up in one gigabyte files, but it can't extract on the client machine unless the client machine has WinRAR installed. So I'm creating a WinRAR application and setting that as a dependency for the actual product application.

So here, we see that, again, I'm using script installer. Here's my extract and combine command line. We have details on these command lines in the handout. But this is what it looks like, the split files. And so first, it's going to combine, extract, and then it's going to run the regular command line install. It's on this under System and Hidden and Silent. So dependency-- here's the dependency, the WinRAR. So that's all I need to show here. OK, move on quickly.

Yeah, so here's what it looks like installed. I think I'm going into the cache. Yeah, so I'm showing it installed. I'll just apply it, mixing. OK, I'm just going to show you quickly what it actually does. So I go to the cache folder, deleting the extracted content. And here, it's extracting the items. And then it's running the installer once the extraction has completed.

OK, next topic, BIM 360 Glue desktop-- so this is not really about the BIM 360 Glue desktop. This is about a specific issue which is not SFX or stuff like that. Instead, it's that this product needs to have certificates installed. Otherwise, it's going to warn you. And this is a pop-up that's going to come up. If you try to install this with SCCM, it's going to break, because it needs user interaction.

So what we need to do to get around this is basically create an application or a package that's going to run before we install the BIM 360 Glue. And it's going to apply that certificate that it needs to be able to install this product. So this is useful, because there's a lot of customer issues where they have problems with SCCM and they don't know how to get around that, and it's related to certificates. So the key is to always basically apply and install the certificate on the client machines before you try to apply the product. And this is-- I think Revit is the most common product that has add-ons that are either not signed and won't run or that they're signed, but they don't get installed.

So I'm going to show a quick vid of that. So this is where you can download the BIM 360 Glue. I'm going to fast forward. I think I missed it. Here we go. Yeah, so now, it's downloading. And it's going to auto-launch. So now, it's launching the application. And boom. It means we get the security warning for the certificate. So I have to manually click. Yeah, yeah, I'm just showing you the certificate here. This is where you get a certificate, by the way. So you export the certificate to your primary site server. And then you need the Certificate Manager EXE, which is going to-- which is the programs you need to apply the certificate on the client machine.

Fast forward. And once it's installed, it's going to pop up like this. And in SCCM, it's going to look more like-- it installed so quickly that I had it in this smaller window here. So now, it's running on the-- so now, it starts installing. So it's not completely hidden install. Another thing, it needs to install in the user settings. So user has to be logged in. But it will install it without any user interaction because this certificate is the only item that needs user interactions.

Dark sites-- so another issue has been customers complaining that mainly Revit, which downloads content during install to their client machines, that they don't have internet access on those client machines. So as PG said, this will either make the installation very, very slow when it tries to download content, when it can't access-- people think that it's stuck. And I think the failure will be ignored. So the Revit product usually installs anyway, but the content will not be applied.

So the workaround for this is basically downloading the Revit content. And there's instructions for this in the handout. So you download the Revit content. And it's an extractable executable, but it's not-- it's not able to install silently. So the recommended way that we recommend is basically extracting all the content on the primary site server or your source location, and then creating a script that's going to copy all this content to the correct location.

The correct location is-- so basically when you extract them, it extracts them into a folder structure that is the one that's supposed to be on the machine, which is under Program Files RVT 2019, and then the content. But the whole path is actually found in the Revit INI when you install it. And the detail for that is also in the handout. And so in this case, in the handout we did a demo with the German content.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

KRISTOFER BARROS: Yeah, so if you know how-- when you expand the Revit-specific items, if you don't have anything checked, if you don't check the German, it's not going to try to do that.

AUDIENCE: So you uncheck all the content?

KRISTOFER BARROS: Yeah, you uncheck it, and then and then it won't install the content. It's just a short video here about how to manage that.

PALANIVEL GNANASEKARAN: Christopher.

KRISTOFER BARROS: Yeah?

PALANIVEL GNANASEKARAN: We have five minutes.

KRISTOFER BARROS: OK. Maybe we skip this video then, it's not that interesting. OK, back to the PowerPoint. OK, desktop shortcuts-- this has been a big thing. Customers have been asking us, we don't want desktop shortcuts and we never understood why. What's wrong with our shortcuts?

PALANIVEL GNANASEKARAN: Actually, this screenshot was sent by a customer.

KRISTOFER BARROS: Yeah, it explains everything, right? Yeah, so I have to move on quickly. There's two ways to install our products without desktop shortcuts. One is using this command line, which is forward slash C, which is telling the setup XE for command line to use this command line as follows. And Max is the product-- this is for 3ds Max 2019.

So the Max comes out of the name in this setup INI file. And then the EXE parameter equals-- yeah, to 0. So if you put the last zero to one, it will add the updates. But that's default, so you don't need that. But if you put it to zero, it will actually install any product if you have the right name on the MSI there without any desktop shortcuts.

The other way to do it is to create an MSI. We actually created an MSI and uploaded that to the additional materials. And here, it's, again, 3ds Max. We added in stock transformer. So we named it No Shortcut MST. And that will also install the product without any desktop icon. So for AutoCAD, AutoCAD has both ReCap and ReCap Photo. Those parts also have desktop icons. So what you need to do in the setup.ini is add that stock transform with the No Shortcut MST to this, to the ReCap and the ReCap Photo in the setup.ini as well. If you do that, then you won't get any updates.

AUDIENCE: Inside the folder is there a way to have a singular icon to make link those to all your shortcuts instead of having them plastered all over your desktop?

KRISTOFER BARROS: Yeah, you could have that, but I don't know how to make that with a deployment.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

KRISTOFER BARROS: OK, so we have the shortcuts and a folder and put them in the folder. OK, sure, we could look at that.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

KRISTOFER BARROS: Yeah, that's possible.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

PALANIVEL GNANASEKARAN: If you want to put all shortcuts [INAUDIBLE]

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

KRISTOFER BARROS: I mean, for updates--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

KRISTOFER BARROS: Yeah, so uninstall updates-- I don't know if this is a big topic or not, but in the handout we'll explain how to achieve that for different types of updates. Some of our products have updates that are uninstallable like Revit. That's by design, so that's nothing we can do. So then you have to understand the product to uninstall the update. Yeah, so here, we just want to talk a little bit about MSI dependencies, reboots, and rollbacks.

PALANIVEL GNANASEKARAN: We have three more minutes.

KRISTOFER BARROS: Yeah, OK. Should we do this or skip this?

PALANIVEL GNANASEKARAN: Do this.

KRISTOFER BARROS: OK, yeah, so we have in our handout-- I'm going to bring up the handout here and do-- so it's four now. Yeah, we can do the reboots and rollbacks. Yeah, so this was one item that Enterprise support was saying that customers wanted more information about, reboots and rollbacks. Inside of setup.ini, you will see under each section that each component has usually a setting for reboots and rollbacks.

And if it says Rollback No, that means that if the product installation fails at a later point, that component will not be rolled back. So it will leave that on the computer. If it's set to Yes, then if the product fails at a later time in installation, it will roll that component back, even if it was successfully installed. I believe the default setting is Yes.

PALANIVEL GNANASEKARAN: OK, that's all.

KRISTOFER BARROS: All right. You think--

PALANIVEL GNANASEKARAN: Yeah, yeah.

KRISTOFER BARROS: Do you want us to take a look?

PALANIVEL GNANASEKARAN: Yeah, sure. OK, sorry for the technical difficulties and a lot of technical stuff. So we know that it was going to be dry, because we are showing how to resolve issues without a lot of talking. That is the problem with this presentation. So we cannot talk. It's all the things you've got to do. So we tried our best to show you as many topics as possible, but the handouts are very detailed. We have clear detail in our steps in it. You can just to follow the steps and use the scripts in the additional material link we posted there. And if you have any questions, please reach out to us, myself and Christopher, and also the support teams.

In addition to that, we have the forums, the links in the deck so you can post your questions. And if you have any ideas, please, you can go ahead and post it, and it will be available for other customers to choose them whether that is needed or not, create them in the idea forum. So please go ahead and do that. And we have shown the ways of what we tried in our lab and made sure that every solution has worked in our lab environment. But lab environments are usually clear, clean machines, right? So that cannot be expected in the field.

So the solutions provided in the handout might not work for you. If that is the case, please reach out to us. And also if you have a better and efficient solution than whatever what we have provided, please let us know so that we can share with other people and more people can get that benefit. So we will do that. And for the topics we discussed in the handout, we are planning to create articles and post them in the AKN so that it will be available for everybody.

So that is about the presentation. I am sorry about the technical glitches that happened at the beginning. Last evening, we came and tried. It worked.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

PALANIVEL GNANASEKARAN: So we were a little shocked at the beginning. And so sorry about that.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

PALANIVEL GNANASEKARAN: Yeah, we are going to post the sample videos in the additional material. Providing feedback, that is important for us, so that it will help us to improve. This is our first presentation. So we started with a little nervousness, and it went on. I'm sorry about that. And if you have any questions, please meet us in the lounge and answer bar as well. Thank you so much.

[APPLAUSE]