1. Figure : Published applications are available to the user via the Add/Remove Programs applet in Control Panel Note The option of publishing an application is only available within the User Settings portion of GPO | 1. Figure Published applications are available to the user via the Add Remove Programs applet in Control Panel Note The option of publishing an application is only available within the User Settings portion of GPO. It is impossible to publish an application to a computer. Notice that the Published option is grayed in Fig. . Thus when deploying applications on a per-computer basis you can only assign applications. Let s briefly review what happens to the system registry when you publish or assign an application. As previously mentioned when you publish an application it will show up as an option in the Add Remove Programs Control Panel applet after the user or machine logs on to the network. Note that to display the list of published applications the client needs to query Active Directory. After that if the user chooses to install the published application and clicks the Add button Fig. the setup routine for that application will start to install it on the local computer. On the other hand when you assign an application an icon for that application will be placed to the user s Start menu or Desktop and filename extension association for that application will be created in the registry under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT. Then even if the application has yet to be installed the user can invoke the installation process by simply accessing a file that has such an extension type. Suppose Microsoft Word has been assigned to the user but has not been installed. After the user double-clicks a file that has the DOC filename extension the installation procedure will start. Note When you assign an application to a machine that application is actually installed at system startup. This lets you deliver application installations in an unattended way to a workstation or server. In summary when you assign an application three things happen to the user s environment A shortcut is placed on the desktop if specified in the application package . An association s is made in HKCR .
