Deploy Dropbox as a Win32 App with Intune

Package Dropbox as a Win32 app to deploy it using Microsoft’s Intune

Dropbox is a widely adopted platform to save and share your documents. Although Microsoft’s OneDrive may be the most logical choose when using Microsoft products there still are companies actively using Dropbox as their cloud file storage solution. In this blog I will share how to deploy the Dropbox client in your organization by using Intune. This is what you need:

On your PC create a new folder. The folder will contain three files: The Dropbox installer you downloaded and you create 2 additional files, an install.cmd and an uninstall.cmd file.

For the install.cmd you use the following lines:

@ECHO OFF
PUSHD "%~dp0"
"Dropbox 139.4.4896 Offline Installer.exe" /NOLAUNCH

You can validate the command by running the install.cmd as an admin.

For the uninstall.cmd file you use the following lines:

@ECHO OFF
"%PROGRAMFILES(x86)%\Dropbox\Client\DropboxUninstaller.exe" /S

Also on your machine take a look in the registry which version is installed. Apparently the version that the installer states is different than what is found in the registry. You can check the version in Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Dropbox\Client

Now that you have prepared the files its time to wrap them into a intunewin file.

  • Source folder: specify the files which contains your installation files
  • Setup file: is the Dropbox offline installer files
  • Output folder: a folder where you want to save the intunewin file. Choose a different location than your source folder
  • For catalog folder choose no

Now that you have prepared Dropbox its time to deploy it via Intune. Follow this link to get to Windows Applications  https://endpoint.microsoft.com/#blade/Microsoft_Intune_DeviceSettings/AppsWindowsMenu/windowsApps

Choose Add and for App type Windows app (Win32). For package file select your Dropbox intunewin file. Fill out the required app information and choose next.

At the second step for the install command enter install.cmd and for the uninstall command choose uninstall.cmd. The install behavior should be set to System.

At the requirements choose the system architecture and a minimal operating system version. The fourth step is the detection rules. For Rules format choose Manually configure detection rules:

  • Rule type: Registry
  • Key path: Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Dropbox\Client
  • Value name: Version
  • Detection method: Version comparison
  • Operator: Equals
  • Value: 139.4.4896 ( or whatever value you installed)

Finally assign the application to a user or computer group, and wait for the installation to take place.

Hope this blog was helpful, if you have any questions feel free to post them in the comments.

4 thoughts on “Deploy Dropbox as a Win32 App with Intune”

  1. Why use the registry check instead of checking the product version of Dropbox.exe?

    1. Hi Arne, when writing the article I found that the product version and the registry weren’t the same (a couple days later the values did match). Since the registry is used as a validation during the deployment its best to check the version in the registry.

  2. What if the dropbox app automatically updates in users device, will it rollback to the old version of dropbox which is currently configured in intune?

    1. If Dropbox updates itself then Intune will not rollback to the version that is distributed with Intune. It can however show in the Intune portal as an installation failure with the text The application was not detected after installation. This is because the app version in the detection rule is different than the updated version (if you have followed my instructions). To deal with this you can configure the detection rule to use the operator “greater or equal to”.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

%d bloggers like this: