I agree with Arend (to a point). I recently deployed some images of Windows 7 for a client and I discovered that the flash player version installed at the time of the image creation caused some websites to fail in Internet explorer. so I did a quick and dirty GPO software installation of flash player to update to the latest version.

Yes, I know most of you will probably be in shock as I have said more than once, that I don't like gpo's but it was handy for that.

The one major failing of software installation via gpo is there is no way to determine whether every computer has received the update and applied it. As such, I will not be using software installation to update flash etc, as I like to know that the update was successful.

I would personally recommend a program that can maintain a list of software on all the computers and controls windows updates and software rollouts. Group policy software installation is far too basic. Useful in an emergency, but otherwise useless.