Orchestrating SP2A rollout of thin client plugins - ActiveX contro

[Carl Paul]

I recently became technical lead on Project Server for an organization
slightly larger than I have dealt with in the past, and am wondering how to
organize the rollout of the PWA browser-side ActiveX controls for SP2a. We
have over 500 users of PWA without Admin access to their workstations, so
having desktop support staff visit and login with Admin privileges to each
workstation is not an option.

I assume that the basic strategy in this situation is that I turn over the
latest Pjclient.cab to the SMS team, and we install this on the desktop using
SMS, before the actual server upgrades:

How do I find out about the details of this process? What exactly do I turn
over to the SMS team?

Secondly, this will result in a situation --- possibly a week --- in which
the ActiveX controls have been upgraded to SP2A but the servers are still
running SP1. Is this going to be a problem?? How do I handle this?

Any wisdom will much appreciated

 

[Nico Oosthuysen]

Hello there,

Well firstly, regarding your question in terms of backwards
compatibility - you do not need to worry at all. I have already had a
couple of big deployments where the client side ActiveX controls are
SP2A, and some of the servers are still SP1 with no problems.

Secondly, in terms of what you need to turn over to the SMS team - here
is what i have in mind to deploy these controls easily:

1. Firstly, you need to get hold of the related files. There are 2
CAB files that you will need to get from the server:
PJCLIENT.CAB - under C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Project Server
2003\IIS Virtual Root\OBJECTS
PJCINTL.CAB - under C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Project Server
2003\IIS Virtual Root\OBJECTS\<LCID>.
2. Copy these 2 files to another temp location on your drive, and then
copy the files out of them by double-clicking the file, selecting all
the files, and then copying them to a working directory. You can put
all of the files in the same directory. You should end up with the
following files:
PJ11ENUC.DLL
LangCabENU11.inf
PJOffline11.ocx
PJOutlook11.ocx
PJPrint11.dll
PJQuery11.ocx
PJRes11C.dll
PJTextConv11.dll
PJUpdate11.ocx
PJCalendar11.ocx
PJClient11.inf
PJGrid11.ocx
3. These are the files that you should pass on to the SMS team. they
need to copy these files to the local machine (typically
c:\windows\downloaded program files) and then issue the command
'regsvr32.exe <filename> for each of the DLL and OCX files.

Shout if you need more help!
Nico