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 Friday, July 24, 2015 3:31 PM Question is more for Config Manager than App Controller

You could use AppLocker either through Group Polices or ConfigMgr to block the specific setup.exe from running on any user account (including the administrators).

OK...I didn't post my thread on here to have some half-wit try and explain how to run my IT department. I asked a question that wasn't "who wants to be the a-hole for the day?" Thanks for the help...

I didn't say users could install anything they want, and we are managing installs and updates through SC...by the way.

Great suggestion...I will look into it.

So you'd rather not heed the warning of someone who knows and sees it every day (sorry, contrary to your limited knowledge, I'm far from a half-wit) and hurl insults? If you honestly believe allowing your users to have local admin permissions is a safe thing to do, then sorry, you are already owned.

And you did explicitly say that your users can install anything that they like, how else would the user have been able to install Office 365 Pro Plus? That requires local admin permissions.