Anyone have any thoughts on PSADT source control?

The Toolkit General Discussion
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Hey All,

First off, I want to apologize if there has been posts/thoughts on this beforehand. I searched and didn’t find any, but if I missed something, please let me know!

First, let me describe my scenario to you:

My org uses KACE SMA for patch management, app deployment, etc. I am in a situation where we are using PSADT for every app deployment we perform. We set up our app deployments as ‘managed installations’, which is KACE’s equivalent of application management in SCCM, I believe (FWIW, I’ve used SCCM as well but it was in another job which I left a couple years ago). We are in the early stages of doing all of this, so we are still gathering lessons learned with each production application deployment.

In large part, things have been going well, but there have been cases where we have uncovered toolkit settings that need to be changed. One example of this is the timeout that occurs when a user does not provide any input on a deferral prompt. For the sake of a consistent user experience, we wanted to go back through our previously created installations and update the toolkit settings so all applications were using the same timeout setting. This involves updating the toolkit, zipping it up into a zip file, and then re-uploading it to the KACE SMA for each managed installation. It is an easy enough process, but somewhat cumbersome when having to do it for 20+ applications (and rising!)

I am considering the possibility of putting the base PSADT files into a common repository on a file server, and then utilizing a script to copy down the latest PSADT files and adding the installer for the specific application into the ‘Files’ folder of the toolkit. This way, our managed installations are always getting the latest source files rather than having to go through the manual update process I already described to get the toolkit updated. This would make the structure of the zip file being uploaded different - instead of the entire PSADT toolkit, the zip file being uploaded to the KACE SMA would contain the app installer file, the deploy-application.ps1 script, and the script which will copy the PSADT source files down to the machine, and move the app installer into the files directory.

I just wanted to check with you all to see what you think of this process (at least in theory, since I haven’t actually tested it yet!), and whether or not there is someone out there who might already have a well-established process to overcome the challenge I’ve described here.

If there are any questions/concerns, please don’t hesitate to let me know.

Thanks!!

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Most places don’t want to risk changing old known good packages without testing.
In the places I’ve been working in the past 20+ years we’d change settings with the new version of the application when it came out.

You are probably the 5th or so person that asks about this and no :cowboy_hat_face: has ever reported back that they have a centralized copy or management of their PSADT scripts with great success or failure.

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Thank you for the reply! You make a good point - updating the settings with the new version of the application would probably be the most sensible thing to do. Thanks a bunch for the perspective!

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You could package the PSADT source by version and mark as a dependency if KACE allows that if you really wanted to go that route. Then you’d only need to update the PSADT package to change configurations. However, I too was thinking of rolling it out similarly but opted to just include it per each. Essentially what T.A.G. states is “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” which I agree :slight_smile:

Worst-case, I can tweak a package or two if it absolutely needs it, but typically just leave it and it’ll eventually be phased out by updated versions, etc.

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