Uninstallers?

[ianmb]

We're just getting going with Self Service, and I wondered what you guys are doing (if anything) with providing uninstallers to your customers?

If a software vendor offers an uninstaller do you include it by default in your Self Service, and if so for which products? Do you roll your own uninstallers (perhaps just a script containing a bunch of rm commands e.g. MS Office 2011), and if so for which software packages?

[RobertHammen]

How often are you uninstalling software, and why?

I've really only written scripts to uninstall Creative Suite apps (easier/better/more thorough than Adobe's CCleaner tool).

If users are admins, you could just make this available in Self Service (free app):

http://www.freemacsoft.net/appcleaner/

[bentoms]

@ianmb, we rarely have a use for uninstallers.. but we have had a vendor supplied uninstaller pkg as part of a re-install policy (it runs the uninstaller then the installer). This was something we were advised by the vendor.

If it's something that was deployed via a DMG, you could index the DMG & tick "Allow this packaged to be uninstalled from Casper Remote or Policy" (something like that) from within Casper Admin.

[Chris_Hafner]

I usually create my own, but it depends. In our environment our students leave at the end of the year with their own units and we have to make sure that our licensed software isn't on there. Having some really quick uninstaller and cleaner scripts make that a breeze. The software that we need to remove ranges from MS Office to Sophos to the Adobe Creative Suite and so on. Because we have a heavy need for uninstallers I tend to use Composer to create .dmgs of anything I can. I index the disk image and set the checkbox to "Allow package to be uninstalled" in Casper Admin. Otherwise, we also use either manufacture supplied uninstallers (I'm looking at you adobe) and other cleaning scripts to sort those out.

For example, MS Office 2008 and 2011 were packaged via Composer so I use a composer built uninstaller for that one.