EmailXtender Client deployment

Question

Hi everybody,

As an engineer for a small IT company I found myself involved in an EmailXtender implementation for one of our customers. EX is totally new to me, so the learning curve has been steep. Very steep.

Right now, we are trying to find an automated way of deploying the EXclient to some 1500 users, and prevent as much manual work as we can.
We want to use scripts, to take care of the deployment for most of the users.
We do not expect things to go smoothly for 1500 users, as our tests have already shown that some the desktops ARE a problem.
What we are looking for is a complete installation procedure for a cleanly installed machine.
Some of you have probably faced a similar task, so maybe I can benefit from your experience.

I have a some questions:

1. The ExClientSetup.exe command.
I can imagine there are more options to it than described in the installation manual. Some of them ( like REBOOT ) have been mentioned in other posts.
Is there documentation on the Exclientsetup.exe command?
What options do you know, and what do they do?

2. Registry settings.
We have been looking at manipulating registry settings through scripting, but have not been able to detect all the registry settings used by search plugin.
For instance, we want to change the default setting of searching only the default Exserver to searching all defined servers. This one still eludes us.
Is there documentation on registry settings used by the client?
What do you think about this approach of enforcing registry settings?

Feel free to give any other advice or inside you might have.
It will be very much appreciated.

Thank you very much in advance.

Chamad

RKatwal · Answer

1. The ExClientSetup.exe command.I can imagine there are more options to it than described in the installation manual. Some of them ( like REBOOT ) have been mentioned in other posts.Is there documentation on the Exclientsetup.exe command?What options do you know, and what do they do?RAJAN: The other command lines you might have seen in other threads are because of MSI package. ExClientSetup.exe uses MSIEXEC to get the job done, any options that are standard for MSI packages e.g. REBOOT=ReallySuppress might still work. Just remember that support might not help in in case if you are trying to use a MSI package for installation. They will do all the troubleshooting when installation is done with the EXE file. To find options available just type msiexec.exe in the windows command prompt or run dialogue box.2. Registry settings.We have been looking at manipulating registry settings through scripting, but have not been able to detect all the registry settings used by search plugin.For instance, we want to change the default setting of searching only the default Exserver to searching all defined servers. This one still eludes us.Is there documentation on registry settings used by the client?What do you think about this approach of enforcing registry settings?RAJAN: There are few things which you might be able to search using solution search in powerlink.emc.com; EX will only search against the the server that is added to be searched against and stored in the registy of the client machine. If you will not have other servers then it would not search against those messages.Hope this helps.Thanks,Raj

Chamad · Answer

When we execute ExClientSetup.exe with multiple EXservers as option, all servers are included in the configuration of the search plugin. However, the default setting of the search plugin is to query only the default EXserver. We are looking for a way to change that.
I was hoping there would be more options to ExClientSetup.exe.

Thanks for your explanation about the use of MSI.
I wasn't aware of that.

Ytsejamer1_ef7a41 · Answer

Yeah, I was hoping for some true type of automated deployment but with all the options that have to be set, it wasn't feasible. Luckily i had a team of techs that would install the exclient and UC (if needed) as they ran across users with other tech problems. It was like a rolling deployment. Also I had a list of user mailboxes and would assign them like five or six a day. They would go around and install it per my list.

Communication between myself and techs were paramount to keeping it organized.

Overall it took me about a year and a couple months to roll it out to about 700 users. I stopped deploying EX a few times as I found more and more and more problems with the platform, waiting for SP releases to fix stuff.

SourceOne

EmailXtender Client deployment

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