Group Policy Software Installation Not Working
I have been trying to deploy an application .msi via Group Policy for a few days. The environment is mixed Windows 7 on desktops and laptops and Windows 10 Surface 3's. We use a peripheral called E-pads to obtain electronic signatures out in the field both on laptops and now (attempting) on the surfaces. We use a cloud based EMR program. While in the field, our staff may obtain multiple signatures for various documents.
While the drivers and applications work fine on the Windows 7 machines, we discovered that the program crashes after one signature is obtained when on a Surface 3 running Win 10. We contacted our software host and the manufacturer of our signature pads, and came up with the viable solution of running a software and driver update to the existing software already installed on our windows 10 machines that 100% solves the problem.
My issue now is that we have deployed over 100 of these surfaces and do not have the manpower to touch each machine individually in a timely fashion, so I decided to deploy the software through GPO. However, it fails to install on any Windows 10 machines. The MSI packages install flawlessly on the Win7 machines we add to the test OU, but the Win10 machines stubbornly refuse to accept the computer policy. I enabled and changed the wait time for network connectivity to 120 seconds after reading about a similar issue that occurred when Win7 first came out, but this didn't solve anything other than make the boot time take longer.
Using Group Policy to install software remotely is an economical way of installing applications to all the Computers at once and you don’t need to purchase any additional licenses for that. To install software remotely, we need to use.MSI packages, we cannot use.EXE files.
Software Installation is not working via GPO. Right click on 'Group Policy Result' and choose wizard to generate a report for the problematic computer and user. Today a customer had a few Windows 7 workstations which were not receiving software which is pushed through group policy. RSOP.msc and gpresult had confirmed that the group policy instructing the software installation was successfully applied to the workstation.
I AM getting a notice in Denied GPO's that the MSI deployment is failing- Access Denied (Security Filtering)- So I started tinkering with the permissions on the share folder, going to far as to give full control of the folder to All Users, and still it's failing.
I packaged the MSI two different ways- one was wrapping the existing .exe's into an MSI package, the other was using an MSI builer to monitor the installation and build a package based on oall the low-level registry and file changes. Both deployments work fine on Win 7, and fail on Win 10.
1 Answer
I solved this activating these GPO:
Computer Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > System > Group Policy Enable the Specify startup policy processing wait time. Set Amount of time to wait (in seconds): = 30
Group Policy Software Installation Not Working Video
Computer Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > System > Logon > Always wait for the network at computer startup and logon - Enabled