Update: 24 Mar 2011:
Just wanted to add that I’ve had a look at WIX now and it looks great, I can see very clearly now how to get a nice sleek MSI based installer done that should do everything we need. Thanks very much for the assistance, much appreciated.
We deploy a product which has both server and client components. The client is currently a VB6 application (yes, yes I know…) and it uses an InstallShield installer to produce an EXE that we give to the client to go and deploy on all their workstations.
That’s all fine and dandy when there are ten, but when there are 100 they understandably get a bit grumpy 🙂
Some of our customers are using Microsoft System Centre to automate their software roll-outs and they have asked us to get our client compatible with this so that they can deploy automatically.
I have no experience with System Centre, so while i’m trying to build up my own experience I thought i’d drop a question in here and see if some of you experts could help accelerate the process.
Basically, what do I need to produce in order to have an installer that is good for deployment automatically via Microsoft System Centre?
I think i’ve found out so far that it needs to be an EXE, an MSI or an MSP.
As I’ve said, our current installer is an EXE – however it has a fairly standard wizard installer that pops up graphical stuff and asks the user to click next a couple of times. Is that causing a problem? Or should it just work? Or, is it a case of adjusting the InstalAnywhere script to make it fully automated (the UI doesn’t really need to be there) ?
I should add that I don’t actually know if anyone has tried this and whether the customer question is purely “let me know if it will work” or if they’ve tried it and it doesn’t work… I’m probably heavily leaning towards the latter because I know at one site they’ve got what seem like knowledgeable IT that are keen to just try things and see what happens rather than constantly waiting for approvals etc.
Lastly a few things off the top of my head…
App is written in VB6.
InstallShield is quite old, i’m currently finding out what the version number is and will update the ticket as required.
Target platforms are Windows client, currently up to XP officially but it does work ok on Windows 7 and Vista.
I’m happy to use a totally different installer if that’s the best answer, we’re not tied to InstallShield at all, it’s only really there for legacy.
Please let me know if I can provide any more detail!
Matt.
This question is very broad so there isn’t one answer I can give. Basically I spent 15 years experience writing installers and 2 of those years were on the other side of the house at Continental Airlines ( 18,000 seat AD forest ) receiving installers from companies like yours.
Our goal was to be able to silently provision and service software through SMS. Ideally we prefer to receive MSI’s because they are in a standardized format and are customizable through the use of transforms. When we would receive non MSI packages we would typically “repackage” them into MSI format. This is a process in which the package is ran through snapshotting / capture tools and the whole thing is reverse engineered and refactored into MSI.
But we didn’t always do this. On a (rare) occasion we would receieve a higher quality then average EXE that was ‘good enough’. The goals are clear: We must be able to install and uninstall the EXE from the command line with 0 touch by a human. We must also be able to script any configuration settings such as database server name.
If we could do those things and the impact seemed low risk, we’d accept it as is. Otherwise we went about our business of taking it on ourselves.
On occasion I would create an installer that was so clean I would think “Man, I wish ABC Software Company had done this themselves.” ( Of course I wouldn’t have had a job… ) or “I wish we could partner with ABC to contribute this install back to them for everyone else to share in the benefits.”
Maybe one of your sites has a really good install guy and you could work something like that out on the cheap. Otherwise I suggest learning MSI and it’s best practices and doing a rewrite of your installer.
It was a great experience being at Continental and I now make sure that all of my companies installs won’t bring such pain to their customers.