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Deleting an app via PM

fevinsetter over 7 years ago

OK, a bunch of kids here at the school installed Spotify on some laptops. We're not sure who or how many, so we'd like to get our PM to find and uninstall any and all installations of Spotify.

Can someone help and show me how to do that?

Thanks, Jim in Florida

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kellytice over 7 years ago +1

You'd need to run an Inventory task against those machines, so you'd need to schedule the inventory at a time where you can 'catch' those machines online. Once you have inventoried them, you can go into…

0 kellytice over 7 years ago
You'd need to run an Inventory task against those machines, so you'd need to schedule the inventory at a time where you can 'catch' those machines online.
Once you have inventoried them, you can go into Patch Manager and under reporting -> configuration management reports, you'll find one of the subfolders has a software inventory report.
When you run that report and get some results you can "group by" the Display Name field by dragging the Display Name column header up to the dark gray area right above the column header line.    You should then be able to see a breakdown of what software is out there and who has what - and what versions.
When it comes to removing the software, that would depend on whether the install was .EXE- or .MSI-based.    If it is .EXE-based, there is not really a way to remotely mass-uninstall it.   If it is .MSI-based, there is a task you can run to remotely mass-uninstall it.
Assuming the latter, the way that you would do that is:
Target one of the machines you know has that .MSI-based software
Left-click to select that machine and right-click it to choose "Computer Explorer"
When the Computer Explorer dialog launches, click on the Installed Software tab - that will give you a list of what's on that box and you can select the software you're looking for.
Once you have it selected, click "uninstall software" on the upper right.   That will give you a dialog where you can select the one machine you started with BUT you also have the option of scoping the task further out to a particular WSUS patching group, OU, or domain instead if you prefer by clicking on the "Select Computers Using Rules" option.
That task can be scheduled to run immediately or at a certain time, but like the Inventory task you'll need to 'catch' the machines when they are online.
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0 rodri over 7 years ago in reply to kellytice

fevinsetter,
Did you get a way around it? I have seen in other forums a suggestion to push a dummy package and as a pre-requisite run a cmd from the cmd line, that will run a silent uninstall of Spotify. If you look for "spotify uninstall silent" in Google you might find the following:
Uninstall spotify – Support
When running cmd from the cmd line, it is also suggested to use cmd /c and then the command that you want to run.
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