Software Deployment

InstallShield.

I prefer Wise in day-to-day use but there's clearly no will at Symatec to keep up with technology and the fact that they want money for v8 which is, in fact, v7 SP4 is, IMV, a fraud.

Thanks for the tip, we will download this software and test it out. Another tool we stumbled accross doing some Google searches was called AdminStudio. Is that an ok tool as well? And last but not least, are both of these tools good for non-MSI application? In our company we have many applications that run via an old Setup.exe or we have some applications that may be MSI based but once installed we make post-install changes to them to suite the group that will use them. Are InstallShield and AdminStudio designed for that type of work as well?

I'm and glad I found this web site, it is very useful [:)]

i was thinking it to same tool
i.e installshield and adminstudio..

I'm contracting at another Engineering firm - The applications they depend on are resource hogs built for the x64 platform.
Wise 8 is a real disappointment. I've been using Wise for years - There was a time that they released an update to their tools to accommodate Microsoft's changes days after a change was made to Windows installer. Those days are gone. They missed the boat on one of the biggest changes to the OS since the 16bit processor.

I’m testing AdminStudio 10 it does a nice of repackaging a 64bit application. The correct template x64 is chosen and Components that need to be installed in 64bit directories are correctly identified as 64bit. Same with a x64 package that depends on the emulator.

I think it may be time for this old dog to move on to a new tool.

We use AdminStudio/InstallShield v10. It does everything we need it to do. It builds the MSI and we can even convert the MSI to a build for Citrix or App-V install. Saves alot of time when you are using all 3 environments. Have no issues repackaging the older exe. We just run a snapshot on a clean machine and we have our msi that we need to deploy.

I like the exe scripting tool that comes with Wise (same as SMSInstaller which I used daily for 7 years) and it works well for MSI'ing stuff as well, but like VBScab points out, Symantec isn't the best to work with. They always seem to destroy everything they touch.

I've been using AdminStudio/InstallShield off and on for 2 years and full time for the past 6 months, and it seems quite capable. So far, I've been able to do everything I need to on XP/Win7 without issue.