A DESCRIPTION OF THE REQUEST :
 customer  was recently forced to stop distributing its own version of the Java Virtual Machine, so the latest  customer  products (Windows 2000 with service pack 4, Windows XP with service pack 1a) are shipped and installed without any Java support. This means a network administrator (or an user) needs to install the latest JRE on its client computers, to allow them to view a lot of websites which use Java technologies. Howewer, there is no way to automatically deploy the JRE to client computers using  customer 's software distribution tools (group policies and Active Directory), because the product is shipped with its own installer program, and not with a MSI package that Windows Installer can understand.
So, in order to be able to automatically deploy the JRE (or any other Java product, such as the SDK) to client computers on medium or big networks (from 10 machines to some thousands), I'm kindly ask the Java team to provide a MSI installer package for them.


JUSTIFICATION :
Because there is absolutely no way (other than manual installation on each computer) to deploy the JRE across a Windows 2000/Windows XP Active Directory- based network.


EXPECTED VERSUS ACTUAL BEHAVIOR :
EXPECTED -
I'd like to have a MSI installer package that can be assigned to an Active Directory software distribution policy.

ACTUAL -
For now, the only way to install the JRE across multiple computers is to manually run the installation on averyone of them.
(Incident Review ID: 191375) 
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N/A

We already have an msi file bundled up in our Windows Offline Installers.  We will need to document how to get this msi file.  Renaming this to a documentation bug.  Here are the instructions:

The directions would be to launch our j2re offline windows installer .exe file, and retrieve the "Java 2 Runtime Environment, SE v1.4.2_01.msi" file from the LocalAppData folder (The user's "Application Data" folder).  Inside this folder they will find a folder named: {7148F0A6-6813-11D6-A77b-00B0D0142010}.  The last 6 digits of this CLSID and the name of the msi file will differ depending on the release #.  The LocalAppData folder will differ for each Windows platform.  From there, they can use Active Directory to distribute this .msi file to as many client windows platform as they want.  If they want to register the jre as the default browser of IE, Mozilla, Netscape, they will have to create a transform that will set the variables IEXPLORER, MOZILLA, and NETSCAPE6 to 1 in the Property.idt table.  They can find instructions on how to create a transform at Microsoft's MSDN site. 

There is less of a business case for documenting the sdk instructions.  We should have highly visible links from both java.sun.com and java.com as soon as possible.
  xxxxx@xxxxx   2003-09-15


This fix was implemented awhile back by adding the information to
the Help page on java.com:

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/guide/deployment/deployment-guide/upgrade-guide/deployment.html

It seems we should point to this page from somewhere in the
J2SE installation instructions, perhaps on the installation instructions page,
near the bottom, after "Silent Install"?

http://rhea.sfbay:91/j2se/1.4.2/jre/install-windows.html

I suggest labeling it:

   JRE Deployment for System Administrators

   [Done -   xxxxx@xxxxx   2004-05-05]

  xxxxx@xxxxx   2004-04-21

> Douglas Kramer wrote:
>http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/guide/deployment/deployment-guide/upgrade-guide/deployment.html
>
> Do these instructions look accurate?

  xxxxx@xxxxx   wrote:

    jre.msi /v"IEXPLORER=1

should actually be:

    msiexec.exe /i jre.msi IEXPLORER=1

Also, in 1.5. the jre msi file will be called jre1.5.0.msi rather than "Java 2 Runtime Environment, SE v1.5.0.msi".

The directory: {7148F0A6-6813-11D6-A77b-00B0D0142010} will change from release to release.  1.4.2_02 will be {7148F0A6-6813-11D6-A77b-00B0D0142020}

  xxxxx@xxxxx   2004-05-01

Notice this applies to both 1.4.2 and 1.5.0
  xxxxx@xxxxx   2004-06-25

Hopefully we can address the privilege issues at the same 
time. Making it necessary to have local administrator rights 
just to install the Java runtime is a major hurdle for easy 
enterprise rollouts.. short of having the network admins visit 
every machine for manual installs. Msi packages can be setup 
to execute with elevated privileges via Active Directory group 
permissions. 

We have the same problems deploying JRE 1.4.2_04 
to 10.000 workstations. It seam that the original 
package is not an ordinary msi-file. Would it be 
possible to make an transform that removes the 
shortcut on the Desktop to JWS

I seems that the guys @ Sun don't know how to use MSI & elevated priviliges. PLease, look into this and create a new MSI which take care of locked-down environments (e.g. specify your custom actions as System Context!).