Discussion Forums/General/Announcements
New Product PDQ Deploy Starts Beta
Adam Ruth
posted this on June 10, 2010 15:26
We are pleased to announce that our newest product PDQ Deploy is entering beta testing.
PDQ Deploy is a tool focused entirely on software deployment, and has some great features for system administrators. Best of all, it's completely free.
If you are interested in testing the beta, please fill out this form.
Comments
The installation went OK and I've tested the installation of a couple of small apps.
This tools reminds me a lot "www.Installsolutions.net" RSI Utility, but that one is not free.
If you are a company with a slow WAN network (like us), an option to auto-select the software repository based on IP-address (sub-net) would allow you to install application to a set of users even if they are in a remote location at the time of deployment.
Citrix XENAPP has a similar feature for pushing their streamed applications to the users.
Another nice option would be to be able to add a number of conditions to the (un-)installation.
e.g. if the app is already installed, if the PC is reachable(pingable), .....
A management console to manage ready to use packages and select them for deployment would make the product more useful.
Keep up the good work !!
Thanks for the feedback.
We are going to be releasing a server version (called PDQ Deploy Pro) shortly after we release PDQ Deploy. This product will have more features. We've taken your suggestions and added them to the development schedule.
Thanks again and keep the ideas coming.
I've now tested PDQ Deploy on Windows XP x32 SP3, Vista SP2 x32 and x64 and Windows 7 x32 and x64. All worked equally well. I also successfully tested installing a number of additional apps: MS-Office apps (2003,2007,2010), Navision Clients (2.60,3.10,3.70,4.03,5.00,6.00), 7ZIP, Citrix Client 12.0.
I know I mentioned this already, but the product would feel much more as a management tool if it was housed in some kind of management shell just like Admin Arsenal itself, the EMCO products, the Goverlan Suite,.....
I did have issues installing any app without selecting the option to copy the installation file/directory to the target machine.
Is this normal ? if so , why have the option. (Perhaps I'm doing something wrong)
I find it a waist of time/disk space (more fragmentation) if the installation files always need to be copied to the target. e.g If you want to push Office2010 Pro Plus The installation would take forever.
Regards,
Thanks for the additional feedback.
We actually have removed the option to not copy the files to the target machine, since it was only there for a limited set of special purposes which can be duplicated by using a batch file. Under normal circumstances it's problematic to run installations remotely that are stored on a network share, as it sounds like you've noticed. Unless an installer has been designed to run from a server share, the installer gets copied to the computer anyway during the installation process. For those installers that can run over the network, like some of the Office installers, it is possible to create batch files to do the installation and just copy over the batch file. But there are quite a few gotchas that we will be documenting in tutorials and how-tos.
We will be adding integration with other tools in future versions that will hopefully address your concerns about how the tool feels.