Outlook Deployment Troubleshooting

[vagabond]

Hi

I have a number of depots where I am trying to deploy Outlook 2003 via a GPO, however nothing seems to work. I believe that I have followed the correct steps, along these lines:

create admin point
setup.exe /a
create .mft
create gpo in appropriate OU - user, software settings, software installation
new package, advanced, assigned, install at logon, apply modification.
ensure authenticated users have read access

The depot which at the moment is giving trouble is connected by a, more or less permanent, 128 isdn link. The PC has just been upgraded to XP and has Office 2000 installed. The Outlook deployment is supposed to remove earlier versions.

There are a total of five GPOs applying to this OU (all for users):

deploy outlook,
deploy previous versions client,
map U: drive to folder beneath a share on the server,
create a link in my "network places" to the top of the public folder tree, and
restrict users ability to create rules within outlook

The user can successfully logon and have the U: drive and Network Places GPOs fire, just not the software installations. No errors at all in event viewer and using Group Policy Management mmc for this user and computer it shows all the GPOs as being applied.

Is there anything I'm missing?

As a workaround I am having someone with admin rights (not based in a depot) manually run the setup using the UNC path to the admin point. Hopefully, this will at least cache the install files on the PC but I'm not sure how this will screw up the GPO install for future users.

Thanks for any guidance

John

 

[vagabond]

It's OK - I think I've fixed it.

Seems it was DNS. I was experiencing the following symptoms:

(background is that this is a new W2K3/Exchange environment. Headoffice is on a 172.17.3.0/24 subnet. Depots are on different subnets (eg 172.17.5.0 / .10.0 / .15.0 / etc). All are connected to each other by a (BT NetEQUIP) managed VPN.)

From my host (ie not server) I could ping all local machines by host name, FQDN, or IP address. However, I could not ping any host at a remote depot by host name (I could by FQDN and IP) from the server. I could ping any host, on any subnet, from any other subnet.

Seems that as the server *had* to be installed using an unattended script (it's on an xSeries) the man from IBM added a sub-domain to our domain. Netdiag showed that our hostname was "exchange.<stupid sub-domain>.<domain>.<local>".

I don't know for sure that this is the problem, tomorrow will tell, but I have a feeling that I'm on the right track.

John

Hi

I have a number of depots where I am trying to deploy Outlook 2003 via a GPO, however nothing seems to work. I believe that I have followed the correct steps, along these lines:

create admin point
setup.exe /a
create .mft
create gpo in appropriate OU - user, software settings, software installation
new package, advanced, assigned, install at logon, apply modification.
ensure authenticated users have read access

The depot which at the moment is giving trouble is connected by a, more or less permanent, 128 isdn link. The PC has just been upgraded to XP and has Office 2000 installed. The Outlook deployment is supposed to remove earlier versions.

There are a total of five GPOs applying to this OU (all for users):

deploy outlook,
deploy previous versions client,
map U: drive to folder beneath a share on the server,
create a link in my "network places" to the top of the public folder tree, and
restrict users ability to create rules within outlook

The user can successfully logon and have the U: drive and Network Places GPOs fire, just not the software installations. No errors at all in event viewer and using Group Policy Management mmc for this user and computer it shows all the GPOs as being applied.

Is there anything I'm missing?

As a workaround I am having someone with admin rights (not based in a depot) manually run the setup using the UNC path to the admin point. Hopefully, this will at least cache the install files on the PC but I'm not sure how this will screw up the GPO install for future users.

Thanks for any guidance

John