Automated software installation via GPO is a low end remote admin tool which does work sometimes provided an MSI file can be used. If the installation is internally MSI based the file can be extracted and used to perform the automated installation, this is easy to do by running the installer executable, looking in %temp% for the temporary folder that contains the MSI and copying it to a network share. Then deploy the package, this can be frustrating (choose the Advanced option since you get the most choices about how to deploy the package).
The actual scheduling of installations via GPO is rather unpredictable and it can take several days before all the target computers will have completed installation. If you have a remote events console or subscriptions to the target computers, look for events from source Application Management in the Applications event log, event ID 302 indicates a successful completion of installation. Even if this is indicated it is not always certain that a usable installation has resulted, as automating an MSI installation is not guaranteed to work out the way you want to, depending on the settings which the installation designer specified when they built the package. Package settings can be customised using the Microsoft Orca tool.
