Deployment Solution

We use this with NS as well and have a custom inventory job that reports the registry keys back to the NS for reporting. If you adopt this practice, consider that you may need to address how to handle the registry key when an application is uninstalled, upgraded, etc.

Swallen, that is a difficult question to answer. You are kind of forced to ease into it and have to use other methods until you can get some implementation time behind you. Add/remove programs and if file exists are sometimes but not always helpful. I will try to gather some other scripts to help you out with this.mte

I have customers that do this for all of their packages. They normally use SWD to deploy them, and CustInv to read the reg values after the install so that they can receive confirmation that a specific application build has been installed onto that machine.
I like the idea of using such registry entries for DS.

Good example. I'll use it for new installs. But what about upgrades where there aren't any new keys and I haven't, as of yet, created my own unique keys?

I used this DOS script in task server to install the Microsoft C++ Redistributable Package. The registry key that it is querying is only present when the software is installed (my own detective work). So if the key does not exist, the "reg" command goes to an ERRORLEVEL of 1 and that can be used to evaluate if the software should be installed. If the error level is 0 (which would be the case if the registry key exists) then I just echo back that it's installed. The echoing is just my way of figuring out if the script ran correctly.

@echo off
setlocal
reg query HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Devdiv\VC\Servicing\8.0\RED\1033 /v InstallerType
IF ERRORLEVEL 1 (
	echo VCREDIS is not installed, installing...
	msiexec.exe /package \\server\share\vcredist.msi /qn
	echo VCREDIS is installed now.
	) ELSE (
	echo VCREDIS is installed already
	)
GOTO :EOF

Excellant tip. Can you provide some examples of how to use REG to query values in the registry?