Installshield vs

Digital Signature The digital signature is used to help authenticate the identity of the creator of digital information. Automated Report Creation Easily create a report that shows the elements in your project which are included in the build.

PowerShell Automation Advanced Installer offers PowerShell cmdlets which can be used for repackaging, editing, and creating Windows Installer packages. No repackaging needed. Virtual Machine Integrations Choose between performing the capture either on your development machine or on a virtual machine.

Best Practices Validation Testing Advanced Installer generates builds in accordance with ICE Validation Standard and industry best practices gathered in over 15 years of constant contact with our customers. Repository Management It helps centralize and share project resources using the repository.

Multiple projects, i. Application virtualization Choose to implement virtual applications because they offer fast and easy deployment, reduced security risks, and the possibility to run multiple versions of the same application. Advanced Installer integrates PSF, and adds predefined fix-ups. Check them out here. I'll do my best to maintain this content for as long as it is relevant. It was an attempt to write information that can't be found in books - but that people need to make an informed decision on how to get their software to the end user - "best effort" without claiming to be "right".

I am a "pragmatic in the field" - more than an "expert in the field". Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Related Deployment Topics Before delving into the review of the different tools, here are a few other links with information about the MSI technology itself. Here is a general description of deployment tasks commonly supported in deployment tools, and a description of why deployment seems to become more and more complicated. A lot of people seem to think MSI is more trouble than it is worth, and sometimes that can be understandable.

The benefits are real - particularly for corporate deployment, but so are some of the problems. Here is a description I wrote about the major corporate benefits of MSI from serverfault. The article has grown too much, but is hopefully still relevant. In the same article I wrote about typical real-world design flaws in MSI files a work very much in progress - just a "memory dump" from experiencing "both sides of software": development and deployment.

InstallShield Feature rich. Always up to date with latest technologies. Setup Developer oriented. Different editions available. The flagship product AdminStudio provides both setup developer oriented tools as well as repackager oriented tools. Very good release management , localization and automation features for build process automation. At least better than the competitors. For complex products release management is perhaps the main selling point for InstallShield. You can deliver flavors of all kinds with ease: language versions, oem versions, viewers, application editions, etc Release flags are essentially used to conditionally exclude or include certain parts of the product from each compiled setup - this is often a large part of what is asked for when making professional families of setups.

The release view in Installshield allows full overview of all your different setup types and editions. You see all language versions and release setups delivered for the web one large setup file or for redistributable media external source files and whatever other flavors you have delivered. Crucially for each release and edition you can override important settings such as product name, product version, package-, product- and upgrade code as well as many other required settings that must dynamically change based on product edition and language version.

In many other products this type of release and edition management can be much harder to implement. For simpler setups this type of flexibility might be less important. The automation API for the product allows it to be easily " remote controlled " from build automation scripts of various types. There are also command line build modules for use on dedicated build servers. Full localization support with string tables used to support different setup languages.

The base dialogs are also provided ready-made in a number of languages costs extra. You only need to localize your own setup content features list captions, any custom dialogs or message boxes, images with text, etc You can deliver a huge multi-lingual setup. This is not recommended in my experience for several reasons read localization section. The worst problem is that you must localize all new and changed content in all languages before you can deliver the English version. And there are always fixes that require you to rebuild and re-release a single language, and then you want to do so without UAT and QA for all other languages.

It is better to provide separate builds for each language easily implemented. Good community support: User Community Forums. Pretty good GUI, common things are reasonably easy. Very powerful. Somewhat complex. Limitations of the underlying MSI technology's GUI features cause some snags and annoying limitations, but this is the same for all deployment tools. The root cause is that MSI GUI is implemented using tables of data inside the MSI file itself, and this causes severe limitations with regards to dialog events when compared to the full "event model" for proper Win32 dialogs.

Full featured C-style scripting language for custom actions called " Installscript ". Installscript now compiles to native - or emulated with its own sandbox, not sure which. There is no need to install a runtime like you had to before.

Incidentally this runtime was the source of some rather troublesome deployment problems due to runtime corruption - seemingly often DCOM related - and various incompatibilities between different runtime versions. Flexera Consumer Central for end user setup issues. Although the runtime was a very problematic source of errors, all related problems now seem to have been resolved completely since Installshield 12 and later.

Nicely integrated help in GUI. Very important for such a difficult technology. Often very helpful - especially for dealing with common tasks. The default binary file storage format allows no real source control or branching unlike WiX which delivers this out of the box.

I think there is a way to store the project in text format, but I never used it. Not sure how effective it would be. Without a shadow of a doubt, by far the buggiest of all installation products.

In fairness most bugs relate to the special " Installscript MSI " project type that implements a custom dialog model for MSI setups rather than the native, table based GUI which is suppressed. Please take this to heart, if you still use them - they are particularly hard to upgrade properly first time deployment might be OK, but upgrades are breaking.

Other projects types seem to work well. After abandoning Installscript MSI which most people seemed to do , the tool worked quite well for me personally not bug free though. I needed to go for WiX's flexibility and customizability instead of Installshield's ease of use. There was simply not enough flexibility and control available.

Support for Microsoft App-V virtual packages and new virtualization technologies. Allows a few new things compared to a normal application. Application streaming - no local installation on machines - JIT. Use two incompatible software on the same computer. Updating through the server. Present the application quickly and easily to users. More Microsoft marketing here. Wise Wise is officially retired , but it has been resurrected before. I am still leaving in the summary of the good Wise features: Fast and easy and quite feature rich.

Very good ease of use overall, excellent feature set. Lacking in some very advanced features such as IIS, advanced release management, etc Less code focused than Installshield. Uniquely capable and flexible graphical scripting editor. Expiring Setup Launchers Prevent your end users from installing outdated versions of applications. Industry-Standard InstallScript Achieve maximum flexibility in your installations. Dialog Editor Modify the layout of existing end-user dialogs, create new custom dialogs, and more.

Patch Creation Build updates and patches for your products. Setup Prerequisite Editor Easily control prerequisite restart behavior and source locations. String Editor View Control the localizable text strings displayed at run time with this spreadsheet-like table.

Text File Changes View Configure search-and-replace actions for content in text files to be modified at run time. Unicode Support Improve multi-language installation development. Standalone Build Add-On InstallShield provides a Standalone Build add-on that enables installation developers to maintain a clean build system by using the part of InstallShield that builds the installations, plus any redistributables included in the installations.

Billboard Support for Custom Branding display Adobe Flash billboards and other graphic files during the install process. Application Tagging InstallShield is the only strategic installation development solution that creates ISO software identification tags as part of the installation development process.

New Predefined System Searches New searches for. Specify Folders for InstallShield Prerequisite Searches This enhancement makes it easy for your development team to share prerequisites and store them in source code control. Project Assistant Jumpstart a project by using a simplified set of views.

Support for Digital Signatures Save time by digitally signing all your files at build time. Easily Run Custom Actions Schedule a custom action to run at precisely the right moment in your installation. Labels 1. Labels: InstallShield. Was this article helpful? Yes No. All Files. Submit Search. Account Settings Logout. This is because InstallShield tries to download the files to a per-machine location, which requires administrative privileges.

If you try to download a redistributable from within the Redistributables view but you do not have administrative privileges, InstallShield displays the following message: The download failed; make sure you are running as Administrator, and that your machine is connected to the Internet. Modifying the All Users location on that tab requires administrative privileges, since InstallShield writes the information to a per-machine location in the registry.

Therefore, the All Users location on that tab is disabled if you are running InstallShield without administrative privileges. NET tab on the Options dialog box is where you specify the locations of Regasm.