History of lAppUpdate

At the beginning, I searched a way to deploy application for my two personal pc from a home server (based on freenas). My searches led me to the following products:

• OCS Inventory NG: it’s a good choice for IT professional who manages thousands of PC, and an agent must be deployed on every PC.

• Active Directory GPO: you can do this with a Windows Server or a server with Samba configured in domain controller mode. The main constraint is that GPO only accepts MSI package.

• updaters family (Avast Software Updater, FileHippo App Manager (formerly FileHippo Update Checker)…): theses tools are well designed for home PC connected to internet, but they mix the two following functions (checking the availability of updates from the editor web site, checking installed local applications). In my point of view, theses function must be separated to consider the case where target PC are not connected or the need to centralise custom software updates.

So I choose to develop my own deployment system built around two main module: the first one deploys application; the second one checks and downloads applications updates if any (or the full installation package).