Software Deployment

A traditional snapshot captures differences between two machine states - before installation, and after installation.

The smartmonitor tool captures changes as they occur. Here's a quote from Wise:

"SmartMonitor is the only capture technology that records changes as they are executed by the source installation. SmartMonitor captures the replacement of files, overwriting of existing registry keys and more."

If an existing registry key was overwritten with the same value during the installation of a product, a snapshot would not capture this because this would not result in a "change" between snapshots - Smartmonitor should. If you installed your "snapshotted" package on a machine where the registry key did not exist, this key would still be missing after you installed your package.

A tip for you though - I am informed from Wise that Smart Monitor only actually works if you use the "Execute" button.

True. Otherwise the tool would not know which process to monitor.

Well worth noting GB1.[;)]

Haha .. well, doh [:D]

The reason i asked is that my snapshot didnt capture certain .ini file changes (ie. updating ODBC.ini) which was confirmed on altiris.com to be an issue with a standard capture .. but as i see it, there are pros and cons to using it .. what i did was comparing it to results from a manuel installation while running filemon and then using SMS installer and Wise seems to be lacking somewhat here .. also when i use SmartMonitor (it also captures deleted files) i have a problem copying the files to Wise Sharepoint ... so ... all in all ... one has to impro(wise) [:D]

Thanks to WiseUser for the 1st hand info

Bart [8|]