This is just incase it's helpful to someone else, mods / Jeff feel free to move/delete/edit.
I'm not huge on SD's deployment method for 3rd party apps (eg 7zip, or whatever). I don't want to deploy version 1.1 of a program but the latest. Also I want to keep them up to date, this seem tedious with SD, maybe I'm using it wrong. I am used to software like 'automate' by connectwise that let me control/update/script my endpoints all day and dynamically.
So my solution to this was to buy a software called UCheck by Adlice, they're a French company and I like their software. Alternative to this would be something like Ninite, which is pretty expensive. UCheck is like $50/yr and I can use it on unlimited PC's, it also supports way more apps than SD (I believe, I'm 90% sure on this).
Here is a quick list of steps I took after buying the TECH version of UCheck;
1. Make a Powershell script to check/scan/update (whatever you want) using Ucheck.
2. Make a tech license with ucheck (the license you buy wont work, you need to open the GUI and generate a license)
3. I keep my exe on a share, this is also where my PS script looks for ucheck.exe (and the license file)
4. Make an application pack that runs the PS script
Obviously there is a bit more to this setup, but these are the main 4 steps, and the end result is me being able to update/deploy/check for updates and log the results using SmartDeploy and Ucheck. If anyone wants more details on steps let me know.