By violating the binary redistribution licensing agreements of Adobe, Oracle, et.al.
I know of at least one such product vendor who got their hands slapped by Adobe a couple years ago for redistributing Flash binaries.
And I can understand SolarWinds' desire to be on the up-and-up license agreement-wise. Still it is a onerous process. Adobe offers no special agreements for companies such as SolarWinds?
That agreement is between you and Adobe, and doesn't allow third-parties to act as agents on your behalf. Also, there's no way for Patch Manager to verify/validate, or even test the existence of, such an agreement. This runs the risk that the product could be used to obtain binaries by parties who do not have the requisite agreements with those vendors in place.
Not that my interpretation matters much to Adobe, but is it seems that your tool isn't a 3rd party agent as much as a tool to download the files. By the above rational it seems as if Internet Explorer or Chrome could be considered an agent acting on my behalf. Has SolarWinds reached out to companies such as Adobe recently? I certainly would in your shoes if only to ask why company XYZ can offer direct downloading in their product, but you can't by the way the license agreement reads.
so we're talking about writing a custom module of Patch Manager, expressly for handling this very unique, and awkward, creation of Apple Computer
I for one would appreciate the addition and I imagine it could come in useful in other situations as well. I can't even count how many times I've used 7-zip to extract and EXE to get to the underlying MSIs.
This is actually a great Feature Request for the product, and since I know the current product manager is already monitoring this thread.... :-)
And that would be very helpful!
The experience for Configuration Manager 2012 users is intended to exist within the CM2012 integrated console functionality. There is very little use for the MMC in a CM2012 environment, and what does exist revolves around product administration. All package management and publishing activities, as well as the client management tools I mentioned previously, are all accessed from the CM2012 console.
I need to give the console extension another try. When I first started using Patch Manager the extension was very slow and sluggish and often cause my ConfigMgr console to become unresponsive. I found it easier to use the MMC environment. But again, I haven't used it in a while and perhaps I should take the time to work with your support to get to the underlying issue if the problem does still exist.
That said, although pressing frustration with Patch Manager is the difficultly selecting the packages that I wish to publish. If the license agreements above could never be worked out, it would greatly aid the product experience if I could somehow only see the specific updates that I want. For example, I only want upgrade packages, the business edition of chrome, MSI packages over EXE, etc. Now I know I can write filters in the MMC console (perhaps the ConfigMgr extension too, I'm not certain), but they are per-user. Meaning the month's when one of my co-workers publishes updates he/she often publishes the wrong or extra packages.
I believe it would greatly aid in the experience if we could somehow select these things so only the packages we want show up. Perhaps with the option to show all the packages for special situations.
Either way... I do appreciate you taking the time to talk through these things.
Alex