Patch My PC and PSAppDeployToolkit Stewardship - Patch My PC Webinar

Patch My PC's David James and Dan Cunningham are joined by the PSAppDeployToolkit team to discuss how Patch My PC will play an active role in the continued open-source development of PSADT, making it better for the community and Patch My PC Customers.

Introductions - (0:00)
What is PSAppDeployToolkit? - (3:11)
Patch My PC Stewardship - (6:35)
Commonly Asked/Submitted Questions - (11:33)
Catching Up to Recent Changes - (15:12)
Examples of Some Questions on Notifications - (17:06)
Upcoming Investment Areas (Short Term) - (19:06)
Patch My PC Integrations - (21:05)
Upcoming Events/Content - (25:38)
Q&As from Chat - (26:48)
Open Conversation/Brainstorm on Feature Requests - (28:30)
Q&A – (54:28)
Wrap-up – (1:16:13)

[skatterbrainz]

Great discussion! The question about tracking reboots and resuming has been around for years. Scheduled Tasks and RunOnce registry are sometimes helpful.

[fredericjacobs]

Thanks for all the details. For the question about the 'multiple copies of one application' at '1:11:00', what I do is to create a new variable like 'Department' and create different scenarios in the script depend on this variable and use 'Deploy-Application.exe ... -Department XXX'

[pikaskew]

Really cool combination of two of my favorite/most useful products. I'd love to see PSADT get used everywhere, including ConfigMgr detection scripts and pre-post scripts (including maybe even Pester files) for PMPC installs (I currently do this anyway but it's a little clunky to stage). Also, and this more of a moonshot idea, it would be great if PSADT had a mode that works in Powershell Core for multi-platform deployments (UI stuff being unnecessary). Python could get there too...but would not make sense to utilize a completely different interpreter when so much work has already gone into Powershell. A unified platform independent "deployment" framework would be amazing.

[arturborowiec]

In case of required reboot in the middle of the installation my approach always was:
1.Create a separate script that is taking a list of available deployments on the client and then trigger the last one that run (or sometimes I was puting some unique GUID code into the description in SCCM and then I was chosing the deployment to rerun basing on that unique code)
2. Put that script somewere on the PC and then use i.e. RunOnce key to trigger it - no elevation required. Basically anything that will trigger it once per machine with user rights.
3. Configure the package script with some flags to skip prereboot part during its second run

So basically it was working like that:
Package puts the script on the PC and sets mechanism to rerun the deployment after the reboot
Then it starts the install until the reboot is required
Triggers the reboot
After the reboot external script retriggers the deployment
Package script skips the first part of the installation, completing the rest of the job and reporting proper status to sccm
At the end does the cleanup: RunOnce key as per definition is not there anymore automatically so you have to clean the script only - of course if you will use some other method to trigger it you might need to delete it as well

Additionally you should put some info regarding the hard reboot in preinstallation section so that users will be aware of it, or you can handle the scenario when installer does not actually forces the reboot etc.
In case of SCCM it was working pretty well.

Even if for some reason it would not rerun it automatically through your mechanism - still the SCCM will repush it eventually as initial part is consiodered as failed - so worst case scenario it would take a bit longer.
I didn't try that with anything else than SCCM however... but maybe the idea itself will be anyhow helpful as it doesn;t require elevated permissions and basically retriggers the deployment only.

[thomaspetersen]

Tip: Deploy with intune, to show dialog/popups use the serviceui.exe show show popups to users, when installing via intune: .\ServiceUI.exe -Process:explorer.exe Deploy-Application.exe -DeploymentType install