Software Deployment

Smooch,

Did I understand correctly you saying that you're getting installation errors using the vendor's installer?? If that's the case, I would recommend you go right back to the vendor for support since your install files could be bad or maybe they have a set of requirements needed on the target workstation. You could, of course, start running procmon/regmon, and do all the troubleshooting in the world...but I wouldn't spend the man hours figuring out what is wrong with a vendor's installer....

Good luck

- Jay

Thanks man I just contacted SAS support. I'll reply to this again when I find out what it was.

So it turns out it was in fact a bad download of the SAS software. After downloading it again everything worked fine and I was able to get it all packaged up in an MSI.
At this point I can't see why I wasted so much time troubleshooting and trying to get it to work, but I have only packaged about 5 applications so far and I had not come across this problem before.

Hi,

How did you package this into an msi? Did you just perform a setup capture of the setup.exe.
I am just about to begin packaging this application and as it is so big I am concerned a setup capture might not be the way to go. Wise seems to struggle with it.

Any suggestions?

Has anyone ever packaged this? If so, how?

Rgds,
Mark

not so sure about sas 9.2
but sometime last year I rolled out sas 9.1.3 via sms 2003
i did not repackage it.

i read the sas admin guide and created the quiet file , this was rolled out with the setup.exe.
but i had lots of problems deploying sas but after a 5 days of pain I got it rolled out in the end

my advise use the sas admin guide to roll sas out

repackaging sas is not for the faint hearted in my opinion

Yes I completed this package a while ago, and I'll refer to the documentation I created so you can know the things you need to do to make it work.

1. Yes, I captured the install using IS repackager
2. I also used AdminStudio IS to customize the msi.
3. I excluded these files:

[CommonFilesFolder]
[ProgramFilesFolder]\Java
[CommonAppDatafolder]\Microsoft
[LocalAppDataFolder]
[WindowsFolder]
[SystemFolder]

4. I excluded these keys:

HKCR\JavaPlugin
HKCR\JavaPlugin.150_12
HKCR\JavaPlugin.FamilyVersionSupport
HKCR\JavaWebStart.isInstalled
HKCR\jarfile
HKCU
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\ASP.NET
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Code Store Database
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\DirectDraw
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\ESENT
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\BITS
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\App Paths\javaws.exe
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

5. Remove DIRPROPERTY1 from property table (this fixes the "%%userprofile%% not found" error).
6. I changed ALLUSERS1 to 1 in the property table. This wasn't for fixing any errors; it just guarantees a per-machine install.

I packaged 9.1.3, too but with Wise Package Studio. I don't recall it being anything other than straightforward. Make sure you install JRE 1.5.0_12 before capturing, otherwise you'll get that junk in your package. IIRC, the SAS installer ignores any other flavour of JRE, even later ones, but don't quote me: I did it 2 years ago and some kind soul deleted the packaging notes from our project area.

As an aside, at my current client, we package the quarterly (?) license updates as separate products, which seems a sensible approach.

Just thought I would chime in with that we have SAS as an App-V package.
We run SAS in a hybrid mode where its installed to a server share.
This allows us to update the licence from one central location.

I deploy as follows:

http://www.thedecoderwheel.com/?p=1110