Software Deployment

There are many different versions of each flavour of isscript. If you look in the property table of an application that requires some version of isscript it will give a complete version number that's required. e.g. 8.1.0.293 - lower minor versions will normally work ok (if your app requires a lower version of 8.1) You can't see exactly which version of isscript you've got without looking on the file table of the msi. I think that it is the version of idriver.exe that counts.

Occasionally there are other issues e.g. SPSS 12 required a special version of isscript to deploy via group policy to avoid the infamous 1603 error.

More seriously, if you try to deploy different versions of isscript via group policy only the first version will be deployed, and hand installs of other versions (earlier or later) won't work. As far as I can tell this is because all versions of isscript use the same product ID. This works when hand installing because the installer doesn't leave evidence that it has already been installed. r.g. ARP never shows that you have installed isscript. However, if you install via group policy then it appears in ARP. This prevents you from installing any other version of isscript unless you either uninstall isscript, or at least run msicuu (or msizap) to remove the ARP information. This doesn't allow you to install another version of isscript via group policy, because the product ID is still recorded by the client which will see that it is already installed and refresh the existing software policy.

Some of these problems have been discussed in a thread "Atach installscript engine to one msi via GPO" on these boards.

The only way that I can see to deploy isscript via group policy without getting in a complete mess is to create a special MSI for your isscript which installs isscript as a nested installation. This is a type 7 custom action. I can't see that here's any need to include an uninstall action as you can't normally uninstall isscript. I've made these using the do nothing example from the wix toolset adding a custom action, and using the scripting examples from the platform SDK to store the isscript as a storage in the msi. The wix toolset doesn't support nested installs as it obviously regards nested installs as outside the spirit of clean MSIs.

If you don't fancy hand assembling/scripting your won MSIs, I expect a number of MSI builders will support nested installs. Installer2Go from dev4pc.com will do this. The resulting installer is a lot messier, but it's easy to do, and the free version of installer2go will work perfectly well.

Mike

You are right, they are the same.

Alot of companies that I've worked for also roll out the different versions of the ISScript engines. Its a pity really, because those InstallScript installs are just do darn messy, not to mention the amount of cr@p that goes into the registry!

[:@]

Is it correct that there is a feature in installshield that converts a isscript based msi to a standard msi? I dont use installshield but wise......

ORIGINAL: sejacru

Is it correct that there is a feature in installshield that converts a isscript based msi to a standard msi? I dont use installshield but wise......


Yes, Admin Studio 6 *PROFESSIONAL* will do this.

(we have standard [:@] )


mdmjr:

Execellent info! That answers a number of questions that I had. I'll give that custom action you described a go in the next day or two.

I can't thank you enough mdmjr!

This post has been the answer to my day and a half odyssey of how to install iTunes 6 on my Windows 2000 laptop.

After reading page after page of instructions on how to solve the infamous 1607 / 1608 InstallShield messages and having none of them work, your info was what it took.

1607 appeared to have been caused by the 'healing' link to isscript8.msi having been pointed to a network dfs share that I did not have access to at home (this I figured out early yesterday).

The answer to the 1608 was given by you above.

ISScript (product ID {790ec520-cccc-4810-a0fe-061633204ce4}) indeed does have an associated GPO on my machine. So I'd tried pulling and running the isscript11.msi file, and it appeared to run, but it left no associated files in my Program Files\Common Files\InstallShield\Driver\11 (just the version 8 files that had been there previously).

Going into the registry, I was able to edit the entry for "HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Installer\Products\025CE097CCCC01840AEF60613302C44E" which is ProductName = "ISScript".

I took the isscript11.msi from this page:

http://consumer.installshield.com/kb.asp?id=Q108322

And edited the registry entry as below:

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Installer\Products\025CE097CCCC01840AEF60613302C44E\SourceList]
"PackageName"="isscript11.msi"
"LastUsedSource"="n;1;C:\\Program Files\\Common Files\\InstallShield\\IScript\\"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Installer\Products\025CE097CCCC01840AEF60613302C44E\SourceList\Media]
"DiskPrompt"="[1]"
"1"="DISK1;1"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Installer\Products\025CE097CCCC01840AEF60613302C44E\SourceList\Net]
"1"="C:\\Program Files\\Common Files\\InstallShield\\IScript"

So, now when the "ISScript" program is checked for, the isscript11.msi is run (not off the DFS share, but locally) and the files installed and the iTunes install then proceeded past that flippin error.

---

Again, I can't thank you enough!!!one!! [:D]

We have experienced similar problems in the past. We have one GPO that installs different versions of ISScript: 10.5 and 11. This works fine. They appear separately in Add Remove Programs.

Hi,

I have posted instructions as to how I created an MSI wrapper for ISScript8.msi using free tools (WIWW and Orca) to AppDeploy:
[link]http://itninja.com/link/flexera-software---knowledge-base[/link]

Hope this helps anyone else trying to do the same.

Chris