Kronos Workforce Analytics Office branding
I'm having a hard time with this package I was asked to deploy. It's called Kronos Workforce Analytics office which adds a Kronos plugin to Excel, Word and Powerpoint. The package was given to me as a setup.exe and I tried using that, passing all my parameters through but it kept failing pretty much around the last steps with an error code 5. I think it's coming from the last dialog box that gets displayed asking if I want to view the MSI log file which for some reason must not be getting skipped in silent mode.
So I extracted the MSI's, which there was 3 of them; MS WSE Runtime, Kronos Workforce Analytics office, and Microstrategy. I did notice that the Microstrategy msi is chained inside the Kronos msi. The problem is when I run the msi as the logged in users (admin) everything is perfect but when I install it via Altiris using either the System account or the service account we sometimes use all the branding gets name Microstrategy instead of Kronos. This includes all the menu entries on the addin tab, the splash screen that comes up when you start it and all the sub windows. I've looked through the custom actions and I couldn't find anything that stuck out at me.
Another thing I just found out is they hard coded the temp file location to a user profile. It's not stored in the registry anywhere so it has to be in one of the dll's.
Anyone have any ideas where to look or what would cause the differences from installing as logged on user versus system/service account? I'm in the process of pouring over the logs but it's a slow process and I need to have this out in a few days.
Jason
Answers (1)
Is this a COM plugin for Excel?
If so have a look at this, I cant find the MSDN article but this link explains it. Its like Active setup but for Office, it will propergate the keys to HKCU when office is started.
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vsto/thread/0e697317-3077-488e-a57d-689b942f4f93
If its a COM addin you can register it youself and get it populated with the above.
The temp file location an issue? When you state that do you mean its coded to User A, so when User B starts the app it temps to User A?
How are you deploying it? Are you getting the Kronos to kick off the Microstrategy MSI, or are you doing that manually yourself with the deployment tool?
Comments:
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I figured out what I was doing wrong; kind of a rookie mistake but that happens when trying to multitask with a heavy workload and short deadlines.
What was happening is when I ran it via Altiris under the System or our Service account files weren't getting copied to the user profile folder, they weren't getting copied anywhere and the install log showed no errors. So what I did was install it locally under a local admin and grabbed those files and added them to the package under a new current user component and set a per user reg key as the key path. I had to modify the xml settings file to use a system variable instead of that hard coded path to where it saves the temp files. After that I had to add an active setup to trigger a self repair at user logon to copy those file to their profile and all was good.
Just another one in a long string of crappy vendor packages :(
Thanks for your suggestions.
Jason - jwiz 11 years ago
