Software Deployment

The realistic alternative you now have to mull over equal exactly zero: Flexera swallowed the Wise family of products in November of this year. There is InstallAnywhere, I suppose, but I've never seen it in use at any of the clients I've worked for over the last [x] years.

http://www.advancedinstaller.com/ ?

You will definitely get what you pay for. Do you want to spend a ton of time trying to figure out why it didn't work? ORCA's free, but trying to package solely in ORCA is like designing a rich webpage in Notepad. You can do it and it's pretty studly to do be able to, but you'll spend a TON of time getting it to work. There are other small players like InstallAware out there and I think Delphi lets you build MSIs (but don't quote me on this). However, the only player with a large support community and a large amount of documentation is our friend AdminStudio. It's got a very good toolset that I would be willing to bet smaller players lack.

Oh, you could use Winbatch/VB to mimic an MSI and do file copies, regedits, logs, etc, but YUK and double YUK. Again, be ready to spend a ton of development time that you don't need to spend.

You mentioned *realistic* alternatives - of that there really aren't any unless you want to gamble on a smaller player. I'd say that's a losing bet.

Thanks for the replies. I pretty much figured as much, but still needed to check out the alternatives. Much appreciated!