Installing a specific admin tool via Group Policy

[Jay Scovill]

Here's a twist on a question that's been asked and answered here many
times.

I would like to deploy the ADU&C snap-in to a group of users via group
policy.

Obviously this means I can't use the ADDLOCAL switch to specficy a
particular tool.

I've tried modifying the adminpak.msi via transforms but I cannot get a
combination that works to just install that one snapin. ALL (DNS, etc) the
snapins end up getting installed. And that is only if I run it via the
commandline (msiexec /i adminpak.msi transforms=whatever.mst). This still
doesn't help me deploying it via group policy.

If I try to use that same tranform via group policy it just tells me "This
action is only valid for products that are currently installed."

Has anyone had any luck modifying the msi so specific tools can be deployed
to non-administrative users via group policy?

 

[Brandon McCombs]

Here's a twist on a question that's been asked and answered here many
times.

I would like to deploy the ADU&C snap-in to a group of users via group
policy.

Obviously this means I can't use the ADDLOCAL switch to specficy a
particular tool.

I've tried modifying the adminpak.msi via transforms but I cannot get a
combination that works to just install that one snapin. ALL (DNS, etc) the
snapins end up getting installed. And that is only if I run it via the
commandline (msiexec /i adminpak.msi transforms=whatever.mst). This still
doesn't help me deploying it via group policy.

If I try to use that same tranform via group policy it just tells me "This
action is only valid for products that are currently installed."

Has anyone had any luck modifying the msi so specific tools can be deployed
to non-administrative users via group policy?

I attempted to do what you are doing and due to the adminpak.msi
installing other snapins in addition to ADUC (but still a subset of all
teh snapins) I just resorted to figuring out the files on my own that I
needed to get ADUC to run. If you want to resort to that then the advice
I can give is that you'll at least need a couple DLLs. I can't remember
everything that was needed since I did this over a year ago. There was a
dsa.dll and another one. The winternals filemon would be a good tool to
use to determine all the files needed if you want to go that route.