Software Deployment

ORIGINAL: ryanspost2000
I'm trying to distribute a program with SMS. Its and installshield program so have created the setup.iss file and put it in the disk1 folder with the rest of the setup files. If I run the commands for silent install from a command prompt it does it fine. If I use the same commands in SMS it send the package and gets a result code of sucess but it doesn't actually install or create and folders etc.
The command i'm using is setup.exe -s
Does anyone have any ideas what I'm doing wrong? Also how do I handle if the program is already installed as installshield shows modify, repair, unistall options and the setup.iss doesn't know how to handle it.


You may not be doing anything wrong. Installshield silent setup using setup.exe and setup.iss is an outmoded, unreliable method of installation that doesn't play well with distribution tools.

One idea: there is an option in SMS to force the package to install or execute locally; i.e. the entire folder is copied to a cache on the hard disk and then run, rather than running from the SMS share. This may work better for you. If not, you may be stuck with a repackage.

As for re-install/repair, setup.iss won't be able to handle that either, so you'll have to condition the installation on the (non) existence of whatever software you're installing. Either that or just manually blow everything away and install from scratch.

If it was an MSI you'd be done by now ;-)

I changed advert to download the program from distribution point and it works.

Thanks for your help. I'll try to fifure out some kind of script to choose which setup.iss file to use to do a repair.

Hi Ryan,

Glad that worked for you. Good luck on the uninstall/repair setup.iss. I'm no SMS expert but you can probably set up a collection so that it only installs on machines that don't have it already.

OG

Yes I might do that but the problem is that some PC's already have the program installed (before I started with sms) but it doesn't work and needs reinstalling. I was thinking about using some kind of IF command to launch setup with a different setup.iss. Not entirely sure how i'm going to do that yet, but I guess thats the fun part.

Well good luck. You might be able to do that with an ISS file, but i suspect you'll be stuck with a manual uninstallation - delete all the program files/folders, reg entries and theadd/remove entry in control panel. Then start a fresh install.
IME it's quicker to do that than mess with the iss.
You may want to check with the vendor and see if they have an updated msi version.