Software Deployment

Never mind my question, I just had an epiphany how to solve my own problem [:D]

In the MSI package I used the ROOTDRIVE property to point to the redirected home folder (F:\-drive), this I tried before as well but then the installation with SYSTEM account failed as there was no F:-drive at that time. This I now solved by using SUBST in the batch file where I started the MSI installation to also have an F:-drive when installing with SYSTEM account, SUBST is now creating an F:-drive which points to %TEMP%.

When I now start the application via the advertised shortcut the SelfHealing kicks in and creates the 2 files on the user's personal F:-drive.
Problem solved, but if you have better ways of solving this issue, please feel free to post, I'm more than interested how to fix this issue completely inside the MSI file.

Ben

One would normally construct this by having a separate user feature (called, say, CurrentUser) as the parent feature of those features which contain the advertised shortcuts. Is that how your MSI is built? It sounds like it is.

Trying to do the copying at install-time will never work, because the System account has no concept of networking. I suppose you could lash up a Custom Action but that's pretty ugly (and a maintenance nightmare)

Are the profile folders actually redirected by the OS (using Folder Redirection)? If so, I can't see why that doesn't work: the OS takes care of "moving" the files to the network.

I did not create a seperate feature for this, I only have Complete with all items in there, Files and Advertised Shortcuts. What I did change is the component CurrentUser. After creating the snapshot this component only contains the HKCU registry keys. Then I moved the AR and AR.ini file into this component and then having the component point to My Documents\ARSystem\home (the folder the files need to go), but having only this did not solve the issue. Having this setup and clicking the advertised shortcut resulted in having the files installed to C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\My Documents\ARSystem\home. So it looked like the redirected My Documents to F:-drive is not really picked up by the MSI installation.
We only redirect the My Documents folder to the network share, nothing else. The rest of the profile stays on the C:-drive and is copied to another network share as a roaming profile.

How is the 'My Documents\ARSystem\home' path built, though? Is it using [PersonalFolder] as its "root"?

Initially it was using TARGETDIR as its "root", then the files were installed to C:\, which is logical as ROOTDRIVE was not set and it defaults to C:\. Then I changed it to have [PersonalFolder] as its root, then it was installing to that C:\Documents and Set... as explained above.

It's possible I changed too much as I was trying to get it to work and in the end break something instead of fixing.

Windows Installer won't install to network drives. You'll have to do some fancy CA footwork (and that'll be problematic if you deploy with SMS coz the acct. won't know about your users' "my documents")

Why do you say "Windows Installer does not install to network drives"? How I did it now, with setting ROOTDRIVE the value of the network drive, it installs fine. Every user who logs on to the pc and clicks the advertised shortcut, gets the required files and folders nicely on his F:-drive (network mapping to \\server\users\username).

I understand that the initial install done with SysAcc cannot copy the files to the network drive of the user. The SysAcc is not aware of that logged on user, but the moment the user clicks the shortcut the MSI selfhealing is triggered and this is in the context of the user, not SysAcc.

Well I tested when I got in and by ghosh it worked when I set ROOTDRIVE to x:\ and installed a file to x:\test
By default, ROOTDRIVE is set to the local drive with the largest amount of free space, but it can be overridden.
So, you CAN install to network drives - provided of course you have appropriate access. Not sure quite why one would want to do this unless it's a redirected personal drive like you mention. It looks like you resolved the problem, which is good! That's kind of a cool solution -
1) you faked out the SYSTEM user with the subst command for the f:\ drive and
2) used self healing to write to the f:\ drive after user logon.
Very nice! [:D]