How do people manage their large installs? Silent install scripts? I'm new to this but I think this issue is possibly the show stopper in terms of convincing management they don't need to be locked in to proprietory companies.

We found four ways round this problem. (We had a linux/samba server and windows clients) - With Norton Ghost you can create images of software packages. These can then be automatically installed on Windows clients over the network. It helps if all the clients have the same OS. You might get away with installing a Win2K image on an XP machine but then again you might not. It's quite expensive to get all your machines licensed to use the network install feature. - Microsoft provide a program called scriptit which allows you to send key presses to running windows programs. We used it to automate install packages. You still have to visit each machine, log on and start the script but it saves clicking Next, Next Next etc... It's very fussy if someone touches the PC while it's running and switches focus away from the Installer's window it gets confused and gives up. Some things like WinZip we just couldn't get to work - For some smaller programs we extracted the relevant files and registry settings and copied them to the clients when the kids logged on. The script then wrote the machine name to a text file so we knew which PCs were done. - The final way we found was to form a lunch time "computer club" of keen kids. We organised exciting outings to the various computer suites where they could learn about practical IT by installing pieces of software. They obviously enjoyed it because they always came back! Hope this helps Joe