FarmerPete

I've been using 7 Zip self extracting installers for a few years now, and everything has been working great. As I've started looking at the future (Windows 7), I realized I should probably start to make my packages UAC compliant. About 1/3rd of my self extracting installs are just msi's with the switches embedded into the SFX file, 1/3rd are bat files that issue commands, and 1/3rd execute VBScript files to do the heavy lifting. I've been looking around at how to tell Windows that it needs to give you a UAC prompt to elevate the credentials, but I've fallen a bit short. I can do it easily for a vbscript file using PrimalScript 2009 (It will package the vbscript file into an exe and add the manifest automagically for you). But, ideally I want to make it so that the SFX installer is the one prompting for UAC. Mainly I want to do this so that if UAC is needed, it will prompt, the user can accept/enter credentials, and then walk away while the install happens. Many of our installs are 600mb or so, and that can take a bit of time to extract. I tried using mt.exe to embed the elevation manifest into a SFX, but it turned a 550mb installer into a 49k installer. I've done a bit of looking, and it seems that I am not the only one to have that issue. Anyone have an idea on how I can create a SFX that will prompt to elevate credentials as soon as you click on it? Most of my installs are done at the system build time, in which case the system is logged in as "Administrator" and wont get UAC prompts. However, some of my installs need to be run by non technicians who can't be bothered with "right clicking" on a file.

I don't like messing with the zones, so when I have installs running from network locations, I use a self-extracting 7zip package. That allows you to run the install from the network, but the install itself is run on the local system, and then deleted after the fact.

Here is my basic situation. I have a lot of different Office 2007 products that my company uses. There are a grand total of 9 different installs that we could run, and I've found keeping them all separate seems to be a serious waste of disk space. I use Microsoft Deployment Tool, and I saw that you can import multiple office apps and combine them. I went ahead and did that, and I now have all of my Office 2007 programs in the same folder. The trick is...how do you install just one app? A typical install would go something like throwing Office 2007 Standard on, and then adding any one of a number of standalone apps (Access/Visio/Publisher/OneNote). However, some systems may have Office 2003 installed, and then a 2007 version of a standalone product. I tried making a custom MSP for each version I wanted, but when you point to the msp file for the 2nd install, it doesn't seem to like it. So I've been trying to configure it using config.xml files (which we have to use for our OEM Office installs anyways). Here is a list of the products we currently install: 2007 Standard (Word/Excel/Powerpoint) 2007 Basic (OEM Word/Excel) 2007 OneNote 2007 OneNote (OEM) 2007 Access 2007 PowerPoint 2007 Publisher 2007 Visio Standard 2007 Visio Professional Just in case you are wondering what I am attempting to gain from this consolidation, the main programs have very little overlap, but it's primarily the updates I am trying to consolidate. Each one has to have SP1 in the updates folder, and that equals 9x250=2.250gb of data. I don't personally think it's wise to waste that much disk usage if I can easily get away from it. Anyone have any ideas/thoughts? My big concern is overlap and how do you set a product to absent in one config, and then present in the next. What happens if the installs happen in a different order? What if PowerPoint 2007 was installed on a system, and then Office 2007 Basic gets thrown on (which has PowerPoint set to false to stop the trial version from being installed)?

I have a few install packages that I think could be easily used with WPIW with AutoHotKey. I know the idea of WPIW is that it runs every thing sequentially, thus it seems like using a tool like AutoHotKey could be a bit difficult. For example, I have an EXE file that displays an OK box at the end letting you know the install was completed. The install is fairly complex, and I don't really want to mess with it. However, if I ran the exe in cmd=1, and then cmd=2 was an autohotkey exe file that just pressed enter, it would never get to cmd=2 to press enter since it's waiting at the end of cmd=1 for enter to be pressed. Thus it seems the only approach I could take is to have AutoHotKey be the only cmd ran, but have the AutoHotKey exe execute the file that needs to be run. The question is, how do you have it press keys at the right time? Would some thing like this be the best way (This is my sudo-code)? This assumes that the installer works perfect, but it needs you to push an "OK" box when the install is completed. "%wpipath%\install\TestApplication\setup.exe" while (ActiveWindow.title <> "Setup Complete") do nothing end while send {ENTER} Is there a better way then this, and would this even work? I don't have a VM at the moment to start messing around with, so I'm kind of coding blind a little.