Click Once - All Users

Question

How to I configure click-once to install apps for all users. On another forum I got to \'use MSI\' - thanks - but how. Also, the first installing user may not be admin - whi

Answer 1

If you need to install / upgrade for all users on a PC, Clickonce is not an option. Clickonce is meant for installing an application for a single user without administrative rights.

You will need to create a MSI installer to distribute an application to multiple users on the same machine. There are multiple ways to deploy and update applications on clients when the client does not have administrative rights. A few examples:

• Advertise your MSI in Active Directory, installation and upgrade does not require administrative privileges.
• Use System Center Update Publisher (SCUP) to publish your application to Windows Server Update Services (WSUS). With WSUS you can deploy Microsoft updates, and your application. Both WSUS and SCUP are freely available for download.
• Use Group Policy to elevate installers (not a recommended solution!), to enable non-admins to install MSIs for all users

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

ClickOnce cannot be installed the way you are thinking since to launch it, it is just a URL (http://server/myapp/myapp.application). Thus if you can get a user to click on the URL, you've accomplished the same thing. Here's what we did and it works really well.

We manage 5,000 desktops in a large enterprise and what we did to get the app on all of the machines, was create a simple MSI file that put an icon on the desktop (you could put it in the startmenu or whatever I guess). The icon has the standard app icon and is merely a link icon which points to the URL.

When a user clicks the icon, it launches the application and gets installed, thus all automatic updates come down as well.

Now this worked for us because we have really good enterprise management software to be able to deploy MSI's to the enterprise. I don't know your situation so I don't know if this will work or not.

Building an MSI of the complete app defeats the purpose of the auto updates and things ClickOnce provides. Building a MSI to drop an icon on a machine is simple and just has to be installed once.

If you need any help or have questions on this, just email me, I'm pretty easy to find, just check my blog.

Hope that helps.

-Keith

Answer 3

check out WIX http://wix.sourceforge.net/