Dan at Work (the Sunday shift)

Sunday is not my favourite of days to be at work, but here I am.

The problem (for me) with Sundays is that is a fairly quiet day, but technical support can still be required. I've had a few support calls tonight (nothing too taxing though) and have managed to move on with my testing of some .MSI packages ready for rolling out to around 300 users.

I've been playing with the idea of product updates via Active Directory GPOs and have found that they work fairly well. Getting some of the products as MSI packages isn't as easy as it might be, but there are some products available to help convert / create packages.

This should make our security and product updates much easier. I didn't have the opportunity to look at this the last time we had an emergency update which when we upgraded to IE7. This came about when our proxy servers were updated and didn't work with IE6 and lower. That experience proved to me once and for all that trying to update all our users manually is too much work for a small IT department, so when the next batch of security updates came in (with a mid-December deadline for completion) I started looking at alternatives.

Using group policies isn't perfect, but it is certainly a damn site better than visiting each machine individually. I'm off to get some more packages sorted out, ttfn.