Installing Multiple Apps In Sequence

Personally, I have accomplished this in two different ways (depending on underlying requirements) in our SE demo environment (I use Automox to build our basically everything in our demo environment for automation).  Note: both methods will use Worklets for this (vs required software policies) for control.

1. Worklet - Using multiple worklets with correct evaluation to determine if the prerequisite are already installed.  If they are not, they will exit 0 until the underlying requirements are met, then they will evaluate to exit 1, which will then cause a remediation to execute on the next scheduled window.  This will (eventually) cause everything to get installed correctly in the correct order.
   • This is good for anything where you need separate policies to install prereqs that may be needed for MULTIPLE applications (.NET and similar are examples).
   • I use this method for promoting and configuring our domain controllers in our environment.  One worklet to install and promote, one worklet to have the various machines join the domain and set the correct admin groups.  Domain config happens once after we rebuild it, joins happen every time a new machine is added, so this needed to be separate but reliant on the previous being done.
2. Worklet - Using a single Worklet you can simply do the installs in Powershell in order they need to be installed with the -wait switch

   Start-Process <path to exe> -Wait 

   to allow the installer call to finish before the next one begins.  Depending on the size of the various installers, you can attach multiple to a single worklet and simply execute them in sequence (if the total install size is under 1GB).
   • I do this to install applications like Camtasia, that requires multiple prereqs - attach all 3 installers, then execute them in order in the remediation script of the worklet.
   • If the installers are over 1GB, you can break it up into multiple worklets (as in #1) or download them during the worklet execution from a source (often this is used for 3rd party apps or things like MS packages).

I see… I think Option 2 would work well for what i’m trying to do. Thank you for the help!