I was recently required to package a new version of Microsoft Power BI Desktop for work. unfortunately, Microsoft has stopped releasing Power BI Desktop as an MSI Package and its now only available as an exe. So, below are the steps on how i accomplished packaging this software.
- You’ll first need to download the Microsoft Power Bi exe which is located here https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=58494 and place it on your SCCM Data share on a network location.
- Select “Manually specify the application information” and then press “Next”
- Enter a name for the application and any other additional information that you wish and press next.
- Enter a “friendly name” for the application again and press next, this is the name that will show in software center for the application
- On the deployment types page you will want to click on “Add”
- For “Specify settings for this deployment type” you will want to select “Script installer” and press next
- “Specify general information for this deployment type” enter a name, comments are optional. Press next.
- On the “Specify information about the content to be delivered to target devices” you will need to specify the content location. This is where the exe for PowerBI is stored. This must be stored on a network location that SCCM has access to.
Install and Uninstall Commands
Install - PBIDesktopSetup_x64.exe -s -norestart ACCEPT_EULA=1Uninstall - PBIDesktopSetup_x64.exe -q -uninstall
- The detection method – Unfortunately, this is where it gets ugly. With the most recent release of PowerBI Microsoft appear to not have updated the version information of the application in the exe package.
Therefore, it is showing older versions which makes this tricky to setup.
In regards to the detection methods, You will need to experiment a bit more if you want to get this working to a better standard, However, in my scenario, i’ve taking the simple route and only checking to see that a registry entry exists for this application.
See the image below.
- User experience settings below
- On the next step, We have no requirements or dependancies for this application, so we can click next through the rest of the windows and hit deploy!
If you have any questions or feedback regarding this topic feel free to leave a comment below.
Thanks, Omar