I have done a fair bit of research on this and haven't come up with any solution that can be achieved through System Center. We are trying to prevent the download of Office 365. Out corporate license gives every user in our company a 365 license that can be used to download and install on a personal computer. We would like to allow our employees to take advantage but the problem is that we had a user install over an existing copy of Office 2010 on the workstation in his office and it hosed both installs. Is there a way to prevent a specific application from being installed using System Center?

I don't see a way of doing it because (correct me if I am wrong) system center doesn't monitor machines in real time, but rather uses the various actions cycles at predetermined intervals to assess system changes which it then reports back to the console. I don't believe there is a way for System Center to prevent an application from being downloaded and installed.

Other solutions that have been discussed include locking down the install rights for anything, however this would be problematic as certain items users should be allowed to update or install on their own (Reader, Flash, Java). There has been discussion of a group policy to prevent, however the only viable way would be to block "setup.exe" which is obviously not going to work. The other option would be to lock users out of the 365 site completely using a firewall rule.

Well, that's the gist of it all. Any ides, suggestions, comments would be appreciated. My base questions is still what I am looking for. Can System Center 2012 block an application install?

Thanks in advance!!

• Edited by jerhart-slk Thursday, July 23, 2015 6:12 PM typos
• Moved by Richard RundleMicrosoft employee 16 hours 21 minutes ago Question is more for Config Manager than App Controller

No, this is not functionality within the scope of ConfigMgr.

"locking down the install rights for anything"

If you are not already doing this, you've got much bigger issues like being owned by North Korea and/or the Russian mob. Allowing users the privilege to install software on their systems is asking, even begging to be hacked and exploited and of course allows users to do stupid things like this -- like giving a loaded gun to a child. Why aren't you using ConfigMgr to deploy applications and updates to your systems?