One of the other major deployments I’ve done recently has been a refresh of all our Autodesk products to the 2014 version. In scope this was smaller than my Office 2013 deployment, however it was much more complicated.
First, I created Active Directory groups to contain the computer accounts of workstations needing a product. For example, a group for AutoCAD 2014 Network license containing computer accounts that required it for installation.
These groups were then targeted with Group Policy Objects which set a scheduled task to run the installation script at 3:00am. Due to the size of the installation, I don’t want to have this run as a startup script.
Next I needed to create the installation script.
To start, I created an Autodesk deployment through Setup.exe. This is typically how standardized installations of Autodesk products are performed, but usually aren’t enough to have a user fully set up.
I began with a deployment of Infrastructure Design Suite Premium (IDSP) since it was 40GB and contained the install files for every ‘lower-tier’ product we were going to install. This way you can use a single source of installation files but multiple configured deployments.
Once the deployment package was created, I put it into a VBS script with a WHOLE lot of other logic.
My installation script can be downloaded here: AutoCAD_2014_Network_Install(rename to .vbs)
The Uninstall Products script can be downloaded here: UninstallProducts(rename to .vbs)
The Copy Fonts script can be downloaded here: CopyFonts(rename to .vbs)
The script can be summarized as follows:
- Check default gateway on the NIC, and if matching branch offices change the install source
- Check for the acad.exe file in the installation directory, and proceed if it doesn’t exist yet
- Run the UninstallProducts script to remove previous versions of software
- Run the Autodesk deployment through the .lnk file created from Autodesk setup.exe
- Begin a loop which checks for setup.exe in the running processes.
- Wait 2 minutes before proceeding with the loop
- Once setup.exe is no longer running, continue by deleting unnecessary shortcuts
- Add extra shortcuts that point to a specific ARG file for customizations
- Install additional programs (AcroPlot PDF software in this case)
- Run the CopyFonts script, passing in the Fonts path for this particular product
- This copies required fonts to C:\Windows\Fonts and the installation directory
- Check again for acad.exe, and if it now exists then log success, otherwise log failure.
