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Timecodes:
- 0:00 – Start
- 0:05 – Introduction & Question
- 1:19 – The Scenario Explained
- 2:30 – ManageEngine Desktop Central Demo
- 9:10 – Does this work with remote users?
- 9:52 – Closing remarks
The Problem:
We recently had a client ask us how to schedule automatic updates to the user conferencing software (Adobe Connect, Zoom, join.me, RingCentral, GoToMeeting etc.) so it continuously updates with the latest version.
They only want this for computers that have that particular “flavor” installed. They were using ManageEngine’s Desktop Central and ran into the problem where the user installed the user conferencing software and not the system.
Shaun wrote up an excellent response to our client’s question, which we wanted to share with you all in case it helps, including a demo of the kind of report you would want to run in Desktop Central as well as how to run specific software patches remotely.
You have run into the classic battle between security and convenience when it comes to software installs.
Here’s how Shaun responded:
“You have run into the classic battle between security and convenience when it comes to software installs.
A typical software install requires administrative permissions and installs per-computer but a lot of the user conference software companies ran into issues with that model when they wanted to launch ‘on demand’ meetings so they started to install per-user. Google Chrome is another such beast. A strong security stance is to not allow per-user installs.
For Zoom there are options to do a classic per-computer install and manage a lot of the configuration via registry settings that you can set via Desktop Central as a configuration.
- https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201362163-Mass-Installation-and-Configuration-for-Windows
- https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/360039100051-Group-Policy-Options-for-the-Windows-Desktop-Client-and-Zoom-Rooms
So, for example I can see that I have a computer that has version 3.5 and 5.x zoom installed and if I look at the details, I see that they are installed in a user account at C:\Users\%UserName%\AppData\Roaming\Zoom\bin\
If I push out Zoom 5.5.13142 (latest) to this machine the 5.x per-user install is upgraded to a per-computer install and is listed as being installed by SYSTEM. I have confirmed with my user that the 5.5.x Zoom works for him after this update however it did leave the per-user 3.5 install behind.
To remove the per-user install you need to figure out what will work in your environment.
You can create a quick Custom report showing the computer name / Software Version / Install Location and Uninstall string in the report module of Desktop Central. This will show the per-user installed Zoom too.
With that info you can decide what to do next but at the very least you can export a list of all computers with any version of Zoom installed.
Zoom has a utility called Cleanzoom.exe, which deletes all software related to Zoom. This includes Zoom EXE, Zoom MSI, Zoom Outlook plugin so you could call this program prior to installing the latest version of Zoom.
You can also take the output of the custom report and manually uninstall the per-user instances of zoom as this would be a one-time process.
You can also create a custom script that looks for and uninstalls all per-user installs of Zoom and deploy that as a user configuration to run at login. I have found one such script on Reddit at the following link.
You would have to audit the above script to see if it will work for you but from what I can see it only goes after the per-user Zoom installs.”
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