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hi peeps!

I've read Phil Wilson's book. It's great stuff. Very detailed and thorough.
ORIGINAL:  VBScab

No harm in boning up while you're doing your regular job. Often, management co-opt someone from another area to do packaging - because it's perceived as easy - so you'll be primed, ready to go.

Familiarise yourself with:-
- Windows Installer technology (I already pointed you at Phil Wilson's book), the database tables, how they fit together and so on;
- Basic MSI editing tools like Orca and InstEdit;
- The Big Two "full" editing tools, Wise and InstallShield. Both offer trial versions of their products;
- Application virtualisation (App-V, etc.)

I assume you're already familiar with general support tools like ProcMon, Dependency Walker and so on. If not, how come?!? :-)

Hey Margarito,
I can totally relate, I have recently moved into apps packaging after 10+ years working as a desktop support analyst here in Australia.

Personally I can say that my extensive desktop support experience has served greatly when making the transition.  The best approach I find is don't be afraid to make mistakes, don't be afraid to admit you're wrong or you don't know something and test and test and retest everything...oh yeh, research is a biggy as well, the work is done in the preparation as they say.

Cheers
Rich

Hi everyone. I'm also  new to the forum and I'm hoping I will find great threads that can help me out. So far, as I was browsing, I believe that there are lots of helpful and knowledgeable people that are very much willing to share their own thoughts and experiences. I'm also interested in moving to application packaging, but I'm still now sure if that's a very smart move. Thanks for the info provided here!

Not a bad time to make the change. Just like when XP was deployed Win 7 Project Managers are again underestimating the volume of applications and the time it will take to package / test a deployment. 32 - 64 bit makes things even more interesting. I'm working on a project that has all packagers puting in a manatory 50 hour week to get things done for a  April 2 pilot deployment of Win 7. In the meantime XP packages have fallen behind for the exsisting environment.

My suggestion is to spend time on Microsoft.com/technet - search every term (property names, table names...) you don't understand and read untill you reach a "Ahhh - ha" moment. 

Best of  luck to ya

No harm in boning up while you're doing your regular job. Often, management co-opt someone from another area to do packaging - because it's perceived as easy - so you'll be primed, ready to go.

Familiarise yourself with:-
- Windows Installer technology (I already pointed you at Phil Wilson's book), the database tables, how they fit together and so on;
- Basic MSI editing tools like Orca and InstEdit;
- The Big Two "full" editing tools, Wise and InstallShield. Both offer trial versions of their products;
- Application virtualisation (App-V, etc.)

I assume you're already familiar with general support tools like ProcMon, Dependency Walker and so on. If not, how come?!? :-)

Thanks guys, that pretty much goes along with what I have been hearing/seeing. Worked at a couple large banks in the past and almost all packaging was done off shore. Still an area of interest, so will continue to read up and increase knowledge in the area, but it looks like it may be quite difficult to forge a career in this field, especially being a complete novice

Huge, unless you're very experienced

how big a problem is the issue of roles being off shored? very