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Need a Windows 7 replacement for Symantec's old AI Snapshot

Hello all, hoping someone out there can help.  At my company, we have dozens of third-party programs that I install on a regular basis to various users.  (These are usually smaller programs - like WinZip, not like Adobe CS5 or something - and many times, they require ODBC setups, shortcut alterations, etc.)

In the past, all of our PCs have been on WindowsXP.  And for those PCs, Symantec's discontinued AISnapshot & AIBuilder have been great.  Snapshot would simply look at the hard drive beforehand, then look afterward, and zip up an EXE with the changes.  It would grab ODBC changes, registry changes, changes to folder security, etc.  

However, we are now moving into the Windows7 environment full-steam ahead.  And while the programs still work if I manually install them, none of the programs I have tried out there have worked to do the same job as AISnapshot.  I've tried the newest version of AISnapshot, EMCO, Inno, Advanced Installer, Wininstall LE - the list goes on and on.  None of these programs will grab everything properly and zip them up into an EXE or MSI.  Some miss files; most miss folder security changes, etc.

The closest one that worked was Wininstall LE - out of the 6 install captures I tried, however, only one of them worked properly.  The rest installed fine, but Wininstall didn't put the shortcuts on the All Users desktop or Start Menu (which is where I manually put them during the install), and it didn't apply folder security changes.  (In fact, even though I told it to install per computer, it looks like it only installed per user.)  I tried reconfiguring things, but to no avail.

There are a couple of others out there to try still, but it doesn't look hopeful.  Does anyone have a good working alternative program for Windows 7?  Or, a more "manual" way of making the EXE for MSI files?  We would be willing to purchase the software, but only if we could ensure beforehand that it would do the job.

Thank you all, I appreciate any help you can provide!


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Answers (2)

Posted by: bkelly 11 years ago
Red Belt
3

You might try out the free AppDeploy Repackager: http://www.itninja.com/blog/view/the-appdeploy-repackager

Posted by: piyushnasa 11 years ago
Red Belt
1

Admin Studio 11.5, latest release from Flexera is the best packaging tool in the market today. If you can spend some $$$ it is worth it.

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