A Great way to install Autocad for Education

I like to use this great tool PDQ Deploy at my job at the University of Buffalo. They have a free version which makes pushing deployments to computer labs really easy. In addition, it tracks the installation success and failures, unlike Microsoft's group policy software deployment.

1. Download Autocad and run setup.exe

2. Once setup.exe begins you can create an admin installation do this. We'll use c:\admin for this.

3. Pick the Autocad features you want, it will create an install with everything pre-configured.

4. Create a simple batch file to install AutoCAD(we'll use this in PDQ deploy), save this as install.bat
(in the pro version of PDQ deploy you can type this directly into the console-without the comment line-) DO NOT USE /qn, it fails for some reason. /q or /qb both work.

 ::This batch file will run on the remote computer replace server with your servername and 
::Shared folder with your shared folder.
 \\server\sharedfolder\admin\img\Setup.exe /W /q /I \\server\sharedfolder\admin\img\autocad2017.ini /language en-us

5. In PDQ Deploy you should create a new package and duplicate the settings in this screenshot. I just named it AutoCAD. Close and Save this.

6. Right-Click on the package and select deploy once.
7. Choose the computers you want the files moved to, press the Deploy Now button. I had a list of computers already setup. The installs will take about 25 minutes.