Hello.
I'm in a situation where I would like to make both the MUIs and proofing tools for Office 2013 available to my users (we are a global company), but I do not want to put 15 MUI tasks and 15 proofing tools tasks in each users Desktop Manager as it would simply be too excessive and clutter things up.
Does anyone have a good idea how to handle such situation?
My own initial thought was to create my own "launcher" for this so I would only have 1 task for installing MUIs and 1 task for installing proofing tools (or maybe even combine them so only 1 task in total). This task would run an application that listed all the available languages and the user can then tick a number of boxes to have certain languages installed. The "launcher" would then via LANDesk SDCLIENT.exe with the correct parameters do the installation just as if started as a normal task.
While this seems to work via manual testing, there are some downsides to it:
- Getting the correct parameters (correct hash values and such) for each task takes a little time (assign the task to a device using a delivery method that supports deferral, defer the task and get the parameters from local scheduler)
- If the package is modified, then the hash will change and parameters needs to be collected again and "launcher" updated with new parameters
- The normal sdclient_taskxxxx.log files are not used - everything is logged to sdclient.log
- Not much central visibility over which devices ran which MUI and proofing tools tasks (except for querying for installed software)
- The "Inventory settings" in "Agent settings" are not used, so no task history in inventory or updating inventory after install
Other issues may exist as well, but those are the most obvious to me.
So while it might work, there is a fair amount of work to be done before it's ready to use and some amount of work in maintaining it.
The ideal situation in regards to sdclient.exe would be that you could launch a task by simply using the taks ID as a parameter and then it would get all the information from the CORE, but that doesn't work and I can see several obvious reasons for such feature not to be implemented.
Any suggestions on how to best solve this situation is greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.