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Making Silverlight Easier for Systems Administrators to Install...

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If you're really astute, you may notice that we released a very minor update to the Silverlight 1.0 plug-in this week. There's no changes to the core itself, apart from a fix to improve logging of Windows Media audio-only streams; as a result, machines won't auto-update unless the site they visit explicitly requests the new version. (The new version is build 1.0.30109.0, incidentally.)

image The main reason why this release is interesting is that we've made a few changes to the installation process to enable systems administrators to deploy Silverlight into enterprise environments more easily. Starting from today, Silverlight is available as an optional update for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 via the Windows Server Update Services tool (and, inevitably, Microsoft Update, since WSUS relies on Microsoft Update as its source for updates).

Many customers have requested help with deploying Silverlight internally, and this change will hopefully be welcomed by enterprises who want to distribute Silverlight within their organizations using their established management tools. By adding it as an optional update, enterprises can control the roll-out of Silverlight within their organizations and schedule its installation as a background task so that the perceptible impact is minimal, and ensure that end-users can view Silverlight content without requiring administrative rights to install the plug-in.

I'm really glad this is now available: the need for administrator rights to install a web plug-in is not unique to Silverlight, of course, but it's been raised a number of times as a potential blocker to enterprise adoption. Having this available will solve that problem and make it far easier for enterprise administrators to control deployment of Silverlight to their users.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 22, 2008
    You've been kicked (a good thing) - Trackback from DotNetKicks.com

  • Anonymous
    January 22, 2008
    This fits right in Tim, all good. ;-)

  • Anonymous
    January 22, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 23, 2008
    Making Silverlight Easier for Systems Administrators to Install... A minor update to the Silverlight...

  • Anonymous
    January 23, 2008
    Siverlight is now available as an optional download via Windows Update. This will make it easier for

  • Anonymous
    January 23, 2008
    Jednym z najczęstszych pytań zadawanych przez firmy zainteresowane technologią Silverlight jest kwestia

  • Anonymous
    January 23, 2008
    Jay, there's only one plug-in - there isn't an IE version and a Firefox version. I don't understand how you're saying that Firefox both doesn't have Silverlight installed and it's slower than IE for Silverlight apps. But I suspect you may have installed the Silverlight 1.1 alpha, which is just a developer preview which isn't ready for real-world production use. My recommendation is that you uninstall the alpha release and install the 1.0 runtime from silverlight.net. You'll probably find that everything magically starts working on both platforms. Best wishes, Tim

  • Anonymous
    January 23, 2008
    Genial! agora ficou fácil pra administradores de sistema instalarem Silverlight em todas as máquinas

  • Anonymous
    January 23, 2008
    Tim Sneath discusses the Update capability just released for SL 1.0, Shawn Wildermuth gives us a *very

  • Anonymous
    January 23, 2008
    if you have OS,you can have all world.

  • Anonymous
    January 24, 2008
    I'm deploying an app with SL, but the biggest problem is that if you install it under an administrator user, the other users in the same pc cannot use it, and since the other users are not admin, they cannot install it themselves... So this is quite a problem in big companies where users cannot install their own apps.

  • Anonymous
    January 25, 2008
    This is a another major step in the right direction. Can't wait for August-ish when 2.0 is out. My main obstacle is ensuring user adoption so this will help. Between Silverlight, the new ability to step into .NET Framework source code (so awesome), and having real access to lead MS engineers, Microsoft is (IMHO) re-establishing itself as the most developer-friendly software maker. Keep it up!

  • Anonymous
    January 29, 2008
    How can I get Silverlight on my Ubuntu Linux?

  • Anonymous
    June 02, 2008
    Most of the examples here for Silverlight media have been focused on consumer content, and that's been the bulk of our broader marketing story so far. But we are Microsoft, and so enterprise is a huge portion of our bread and butter, and we want to see

  • Anonymous
    June 28, 2008
    Siverlight is now available as an optional download via Windows Update. This will make it easier for administrators to install within the enterprise. Yet another potential barrier removed. from: Tim Sneath...