Software Deployment

Take a look at the ADDLOCAL property. You can control the features to be installed from the command line by passing this property.

I will add you can use the REMOVE property (after the ADDLOCAL property) to call out features you don't want.

Example:
msiexec /i whatever.msi ADDLOCAL=ALL REMOVE=feature1, feature2

Example:
msiexec /i whatever.msi ADDLOCAL=ALL REMOVE=feature1, feature2Eh?!? Surely the correct method would be to enumerate only the features you want as a comma-delimited list passed to ADDLOCAL? The REMOVE argument is surely only valid for selectively uninstalling features? Thus for Office 2003 as an example (from memory, BTW, so I may have the feature names wrong!):

msiexec /i whatever.msi ADDLOCAL="ExcelFiles,WordFiles,OutlookFiles,CAGFiles"

to install Excel, Word, Outlook and Clip Art Gallery

versus:

msiexec /i whatever.msi REMOVE="CAGFiles"

to remove Clip Art Gallery from an installation which included that feature.

Also, the subject line was about silent installs. Look up the usage of the '/Q' switch on MSDN.

Thanks for the replies all. It has since occured to me that I was attempting to re-invent the wheel when a simple transform will do the job nicely. So that's what I created. :)

VBScab, if your MSI has a lot of features, you should be able to use ADDLOCAL to add all the features, then REMOVE to eliminate the ones you don't want on the same command line. The properties should be evaluated in that order. I've never tried this as I use a transform to do this type of job, but I know of someone that uses this method.
Never tested it myself.

Here's some info on ADDLOCAL and ADDSOURCE for you. REMOVE should be evaluated the same way.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa367536(VS.85).aspx