Software Deployment

I haven't used it much myself, but it strikes me as something that would help people who can't use VMWare. It's certainly better than rebuilding an entire packaging machine, either manually or with a Ghost type imaging utility. Still, VMWare's virtual machine & revert to snapshot features are ideal for a packaging environment. A pristene clean environment is no more than 10 seconds away with VMWare.

It hadn't occured to me that the V-OS capture might be designed for someone without vmware or the like. Maybe it isn't even worth the experiment since I already do my captures on a "revert to snapshot at shutdown" clean vmware machine.

Thanks.


Craig --<>.

The last time I tried it was under WPS 4.62 and it was not worth using. I am not sure if the newer versions would be more of use.

I have been testing this today, and I am beginning to have some answers to my own question.

1. I never used the Virtual OS capture in 4.x, so I can't make a comparison. In 5.x, though, it seems to be a robust tool.

2. It eliminates the "before" snapshot. In that sense, it speeds up things since that leaves just the "after" snapshot once the install has completed.

3. Since there is no "GUI" in which to customize your installation, the time saved might be spent on the back end customizing it through the Windows Installer Editor. This would be especially true for less experienced packagers who are not accustomed to looking at tables, etc. For example, adding a shortcut to the allusers desktop is no longer a GUI copy/paste/capture procedure.

I will report back more as I continue to test.

Craig --<>.