[wpkg-users] Running WPKG as a Group Policy Extention

[cleitet at gmail.com]

Dear WPKG users

First I want to thank you for the wonderful piece of software that WPKG is.
We are a small office with approximately 100 computers, and have been
running WPKG for installing software since 2006. First we ran it as a group
policy script, running startup asynchronously to avoid having the users
logging in before the software was finished installing. But we soon figured
out that the users needed some feedback on the process of their software
installation, and when WPKG service was released, we started using it here.

However, WPKG service does not delay logon on Windows >= Vista, due to
Console 0 isolation, as discussed on this list earlier. This made me wonder
if it was possible to "hack" into the messages being shown at computer
startup (like: "Applying group policies" etc.), and figured that the
Winlogon process responsible for showing this kind of messages allowed so
called "Group Policy Extentions"[1] to write messages here.

I have started working on running WPKG from a Group Policy Extention, and
have copied some ideas from the code of the WPKG client in order to do this.
I have only Visual C++ Express, so I am trying to write it by only using
core Windows libraries (no .net or ATL/MFC). As soon as I have something
working, I intend to release it on some code sharing site (google
code/sourceforge).

To avoid confusion: It is not necessary to have a Windows Active Directory
environment in order to run group policies, as the GPO subsystem works just
as well with local policies, making this work for standalone/Samba domains
as well. I will try to make this easy to configure later on, but first, my
main priority is to make it run :)

-CL

[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa375118%28VS.85%29.aspx
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