SAPGUI 6.20 installation

[Former Member]

Hello Gurus,

I am interested to know if someone made remote installation of SAPGUI with SMS or SMS2003 ?

I'd like to spread SAPGUI 6.20 to 1000 pcs. Is it safe to use SMS ? (not with logon script)

Is there is a better way ?

Please Advice,

Dimitry Haritonov

[Former Member]

We have used SMS to successfully deploy the SAPGUI to over 30,000 PC's.

As far as a better way, that would depend on your network and infrastructure. If there are only a few sites, then the SAP Installation Service may be the way to go. If you have lots of sites with some slow links SMS is hard to beat. If you already have made an investment in SMS I would leverage it.

Regards,

John

[Former Member]

Dear John,

Did make a SAPGUI MSI package (with snapshot) or did you do something else ?

Kind Regards,

Dimitry Haritonov

[Former Member]

We wrote a wrapper program in SMS Installer that calls SAPSETUP with our package. You can also use SAPADMIN to create an SMS PDF file, if you use that approach in SMS. Creating a MSI via a snapshot is not recommended by SAP.

Regards,

John

[Former Member]

John,

Great posts on GUI installs - thanks for all the info.

We formerly used a wise install package to deploy the GUI. The last install package put together here used the snapshot method in SMS. From the Basis end, I feel like we've run into some issues due to this method & would like to go back to a package that calls SAPSETUP per each install.

A question for you on this method:

Does the wrapper program you refer to copy source files down to the PC & call sapsetup locally (this is what our old package used to do), or are you making a call from the PC to sapsetup.exe located on the SMS server?

Thanks,

John K. Smith

[Former Member]

John,

Glad they were helpful. Sorry for the delay.

We are making the call to sapsetup on the server. We chose this method because we have a small percentage of PC's lacking in disk space. Copying the whole package down and then executing it seems to require more free disk space. So far it has been working well for us.

One thing we do is make sure that the installation source is set to point at SMS. We found that a small subset of users (mainly Basis!) run patches from CD

s and that messes up the installation source. The main problem is that SAPsetup /check won't run then.

Regards,

John

[Former Member]

Thanks, John.

For the pointers back to the SMS server in both the install package & in the registry entries (I assume that's where the the point-back to the installation source is set), is the address of the SMS server hard-coded?

If I knew more about SMS, perhaps I wouldn't need to ask ... I'm trying to figure out how a PC pushed the package from the SMS server in the UK knows to talk back to that server (rather than the SMS server in my local Data Center).

Thanks again,

John

[Former Member]

We have an in-house developed utility that maps a hidden drive to the closest SMS share at logon so that we can hard code the installation path. Probably best to rely on SMS in your case.

The key we set is:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\SAP\SAPSetup\General\InstServer

You could look and see how it's set by your installation.

Cheers,

John

[Former Member]

I need help to deploy SAPGUI6.4 using SMS2003 remotely from windows 2003 Server which is setup with SMS2003 to computers in our network.

I create an SAPGUI6.4 in the SMS2003 Server. I add the name of the computer a for this SAPGUI6.4 package. I instal the SMS client on a remote computer a.

When I go to Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs, click on Add New Program, I can see the "SAP Gui 6.4" in there.

However, when I click Add, I got the error: "This program can not be run because the program files is currently unavailable. For more infomation contact your admin"

I'm new to SMS2003 and I do a lots of research but still can't make it work.

Thanks a lot for your help. My email is tonyn2004@yahoo.com

Tony