I was recently working with a product from Symantech called Norton EndPoint protection. It consists of a server console application and a deployment application and I would like to incorporate their deployment method into a future version of one of my products.

The deployment application allows you to select computer workstations running Win2K, WinXP, or Win7. The selection of workstations is provided from either AD (Active Directory) or NT Domain (WINs/DNS NetBIOS lookup). From the list, one can click and choose which workstations to deploy the end point software which is Symantech's virus & spyware protection suite.

Then, after selecting which workstations should receive the package, the software copies the setup.exe program to each workstation (presumable over the administrative share \pcname\c$) and then commands the workstation to execute setup.exe resulting in the workstation installing the software.

I really like how their product works but not sure what they are doing to accomplish all the steps. I've not done any deep investigations into this such as sniffing the network, etc... and wanted to check here to see if anyone is familiar with what I'm talking about and if you know how it's accomplished or have ideas how it could be accomplished.

My thinking is that they are using the admin share to copy the software to the selected workstations and then issuing an RPC call to command the workstation to do the install.

What's interesting is that the workstations do this without any of the logged in users knowing what's going on until the very end where a reboot is necessary. At which point, the user gets a pop-up asking to reboot now or later, etc... My hunch is that the setup.exe program is popping this message.

To the point: I'm looking to find out the mechanism by which one Windows based machine can tell another to do some action or run some program.

My programming language is C/C++

Any thoughts/suggestions appreciated.