Installing Claro software on a network

Customers owning a site licence or multi-user licence version of a Claro product are able to distribute that product over multiple computers. This could be done by visiting each computer with the installation CD and manually installing the product. If the computers are connected on a network however it is possible to use Microsoft networking tools to distribute the software from a central location.

All Claro products use Microsoft Windows Installer (MSI) files for installation. This means that standard Microsoft installation techniques can be used. For more information on the techniques please consult the following sections.

Claro CD Contents

For all of the steps below it is useful to know the layout of folders on the CD's for Claro Products. For more information on this see Claro CD Contents.

Network Installation Guide

Click this link to download the Network Installation Guide (PDF). This contains information on, and examples of, the ways in which Claro products can be distributed over a network. This information is also contained in the sections below.

Installing using Active Directory Group Policy

Group Policy is a feature of Windows Server which allows the definition of rules that are applied to individual users or groups of users. These rules allow for the installation of software when the user logs into any machine. The following two guides show how to distribute ClaroRead using Group Policies on Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008. Although these guides are aimed at ClaroRead they can be used for any of our products.

Installing for RemoteApp

RemoteApp is a feature in Windows 2008 which allows users to run an application on a remote server but see it as though it were running on their own desktop. Claro products are able to work in this manner however some problems can occur if the software needs to communicate with another piece of software but they aren't running on the same machine. For instance, if ClaroRead was being run on a server and viewed through RemoteApp but Microsoft Word was running on the client machine then the highlighting and reading features (as well as others) would not be available because ClaroRead would not be able to communicate with Microsoft Word. If both pieces of software were running on the server however then ClaroRead would work normally.

For information on how to install products for use by RemoteApp please see Installing Applications for Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services and Configuring RemoteApps on Windows Server 2008.

For information on using RemoteApps from Windows XP clients please see Terminal Services RemoteApp (TS RemoteApp).

Installing using scripts

Windows Task Scheduler can be used to execute batch scripts at an allocated time. These batch scripts can easily be made to install software. For more information on installing Claro products with scripts please see Installing ClaroRead using a batch script.

Prerequisites