Software Deployment

All IE are installed via WSUS etc.

MS views them as service packs and not as separate programs. I don't think there is proper way which will install and if needed cleanly uninstall this IE8

Also the links for this such as http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc985339.aspx are equally vague (on purpose).

Reading http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc985359.aspx will make you believe that SCCM is the only way to go and GPO based installs are only for small companies

there is no "real" msi for IE 7 or 8

unless you do a full capture which is probably not the smartest plan in the world you wont get self healing.

the MSI's that do come from IEAK are only wrappers anyway therefore do not support self healing

Better way to package IE8 is to use IEAK 8. This is the standard tool provide by the Microsoft for the customization of IE 8.

For using this tool first install the IE 8 and after this tool, this will customize the installed IE8 and generate IE8-Setup-Full.exe and also IE8-Setup-Full.msi.

IE8-Setup-Full.msi. does not contain any feature, component, files or registries. It is only installing the application by calling IE8-Setup-Full.exe through custom action. IE8-Setup-Full.msi is only serving as a wrapper to IE8-Setup-Full.exe and doesn’t seem to be fully utilizing advantages of MSI such as repair/self-repair or full uninstall of the application.

As IE8-Setup-Full.msi is instaling IE8 through a custom action "RunSetup". This CA is installing IE8-Setup-Full.exe stored in a binary table.

So i think that is only the reason that this cant be self-heal.

yes, i found the same with the IEAK creating the msi which is a very basic msi that calls the IE-Setup.exe as part of a custom action.

Not only that i found that you can install the msi over the top of itself and when doing so actually unistalls the msi wrapper (but leaves the IE-setup.exe instance installed). If you then run the msi a 3rd time the wrapper will install successfully but somewhere in the custom action that calls the IE-Setup.exe actually uninstalls IE8 from the computer....

This scenario happend while making modification to the IE8 deployment package where our deployment tool re-installs if the check sum is different.

What is there to self-heal? If your users are stupid enough (and have enough rights) to break IE, you have bigger problems than that! :) For user-level customisations, use Group Policy or, at a push, Active Setup.

ORIGINAL: VBScab

What is there to self-heal? If your users are stupid enough (and have enough rights) to break IE, you have bigger problems than that! :) For user-level customisations, use Group Policy or, at a push, Active Setup.



Never underestemate the power of ignorant users! ;)
Anyways, repacking IE, bad idea ;) Since it goes quite deeply into the system.. Unless there is some realy special thing you need that there is no way you can customize with IEAK/GP. But i would probably still not reccomend doing it. hehe.
Been there and tried it, just to see, its realy alot of work for rather little end results :)

//Eirik