We have a school district of approximately 800 Windows 7 clients. We are trying to find a way to push out the installation of SketchUp Pro 2015 via Group Policy on a Windows domain. I have researched this and found no instructions. I found one user submission on this forum that addresses this. Should I follow that user’s method, or is there any guidance or instructions from SketchUp?
Thanks,
Michael Mach
Network Specialist
You should share the link to that post here.
@MikeMach Please check out this help article on activating a network license: http://help.sketchup.com/en/article/57586
Let me know if this helps. What kind of school are you working with? K12 or Higher Ed?
It seems to be related to this thread: Network deployment of sketchup 2013
Thanks,
AlexB
School Districts, Apple Stores (in the past, don’t know what they’re using now) use something like http://www.faronics.com/products/deep-freeze/. Create the image you want, save it to every machine. Students save work to school district drives or Dropbox or Google Drive. Kids can customize to their delight, but you get a default view once you log out and back in.
Macs can use Apple Remote Desktop User Guide for Mac - Apple Support to manage large deployments… I’ve seen others use https://www.filewave.com/. One of our good friends from Google, who knew deployment very well, is now at https://puppetlabs.com/.
But if you work for a school district, you’re going to have to do your own homework and stop looking off your neighbor’s paper. 
Thanks for the information. I’ll follow the threads you listed. We are K12 campus.
Michael
Thanks for the suggestions. We do not have deep freeze. We can install SketchUp in our virtual desktop environments okay. It is our laptops/carts that would greatly benefit from pushing out the MSI file. We do the same for Adobe products (reader, etc.).
I’m on vacation and away from a PC, but I believe our PC installer .exe still just contains an msi which you can extract. Confirm that, someone, please.
Guess I spoke too soon regarding virtual desktops. I found that if I install SketchUp Pro 2015 on our base image and license it, it works okay. However, upon sending out the virtual image to our desktop environment, it loses the license file.
We are running VMWare ESX 5.5.
Outside of any technical support (for installation) from SketchUp for these issues - MSI deployment and virtual environment licensing issue, we probably won’t be able to use it.
Michael
First, a disclaimer. SketchUp is not supported to run in any virtual environment. It is possible to send an image of the SketchUp installation to multiple computers and activate with the activation_info.txt method (link below).
SketchUp is node locked based upon the MAC address of the computer. If you send an image of an authorized installation of SketchUp, the MAC address will not match and you will get an error. For this type of deployment, you will want to send out an image of SketchUp that is not authorized and the activation_info.txt file described on the Network setup page: http://help.sketchup.com/en/article/57586
Please note that there is a red drop-down menu at the top right of the page that will allow you to change to the appropriate version.
Thank you for the information. I will review the link.
Great article! It helped me fix our issue. I am now able to send out the installation and license file over our network to windows clients using Group Policy. I can also use in our virtual desktop environments. Here is a breakdown of the two:
Group Policy
* Follow the steps outlined in the web page given by ty_s. Create the activation file (activation_info.txt) and put it in a shared directory where everyone has access t
* Create and configure a Group Policy Object.
* Within object, go to Computer Configuration>Policies>Software Settings>Software Installation and add a new package. Use the MSI file from the SketchUp Pro site. This will push the software out.
* For the license, go to same GPO and go to Computer Configuration| Preferences|Windows Settings|Files.
* Add a new file with the following. Action=Replace, Source file(s): shared directory and file listed in first step., Destination File: C:\ProgramData\SketchUp\SketchUp 2015\activation_info.txt. You must use “Replace” and not create, as create will cause a bug in your installation process.
Virtual Desktop Environment:
* Copy the activation_info.txt file to C:\ProgramData\SketchUp\SketchUp 2015 on the host image.
Cheers and many thanks to ty_s!!
Michael Mach
La Grange ISD