VW 2008 Network Installation?

[Bret]

Our office has several PCs lingering that don't have DVD drives, so it seems that we can't do a direct VW 2008 installation to those machines.

We'd like to copy the necessary files from the DVD to a folder on the network so that people can pull the information off the server and then install locally. However, we only use Fundamentals and are already up to date with QT, Adobe, etc., so I doubt that we need the whole 4GB disc. Can anyone tell me which files are the ones we need to install 2008? Is it even possible?

Thanks...

[PVA - Admin]

The tedium involved in trying to figure out (much less manually sorting) which particular files were needed for just fundamentals would be pretty severe. Many of the files needed for other variants of VectorWorks are used in fundamentals as well, and you'd still end up copying the majority of the files regardless.

The best way to do it, would be to copy the contents of the DVD into a folder on the server, zip/rar or otherwise compress the folder, the, push it out to all the user machines and decompress/install from there.

-J

[Bret]

Okay...I was just wondering if there were some folders I could ignore when I put everything on the server since it's so inconveniently large for our needs.

When I actually called in to NNA tech support, one person (I forget her name) said that you could install locally on one machine and then copy that c:/Program Files/Vectorworks 2008 folder directly to other machines. According to her, when you tried opening the program on another machine, it would ask you for your license number and then make all the necessary registry adjustments, etc.

That doesn't sound right to me, but it would be nice. Is there any chance of that working?

[Guest]

You should be able to zip up the program directory without a problem, with one caveat.

I would keep track of a master installed copy, on one machine. Any time there is an update that needs to be applied, apply it to that machine, and then rezip and distribute to the other clients as you did before.

[Petri]

Our office has several PCs lingering that don't have DVD drives, so it seems that we can't do a direct VW 2008 installation to those machines.

I can't help in your problem, but I just have to compliment your wisdom in not giving everyone a DVD-drive. (When I was a Network Nazi, I used to disable even disquette drives...)

In a Mac-environment, you could just open a "Disk Image" across the network. I take you don't have those in the Dark Side?

[Gerard Jonker]

You can copy the application folder. But I only have experience with machines that already had undergone a normal installation procedure.

You will need to install quicktime (and the dongle drivers, if you are not an US citizen) separately.

Gerard