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[texas_leaguer]

Ok, rather that assigning the app, my organization has decided to publish major apps for our users to install when the need arises. What I want to be able to do is tweak the msi that I use to remove the options for the users to install the msn search bar, etc. Does anyone have an attribute list for the msnmsgs.msi so I can make the changes. If any additional info is needed please let me know. Thank you.

[RogueSpear]

I'm not that familiar with "publishing" applications in AD since I always assign them to the computer, however I think you can use the "Advanced" option when you bring the application into the group policy using the group policy editor and then select a corresponding .mst file.

What this would allow you to do is make a "response transform". I don't know about other products, but using InstallShield AdminStudio, using the "Tuner" utility, you can create an .mst file that is based on the "responses" that one would select during installation.

Judging from your post, I think you probably know most of what I'm referring to anyway, so I won't go into all the little details, but making a response based .mst file is something I do a lot just to find out what the properties and their values are for any given .msi file. Then you can either dirctly edit the .msi with those values, use those values as command line arguments, or just use the .mst itself.

[texas_leaguer]

Appreciate the response. I ended up just assigning it to specific user groups we have; the issue was that I couldn't get it to hide the dialog boxes regarding searchbar installations etc by publishing. I do have another question for ya though if possible. I'm a network guy, not a software guy. All the switches that I see in use, do they go in the corresponding setup.ini's? Or is there something else I'm missing? Thanks.

[RogueSpear]

Command line switches used in conjuction with .msi files are interpreted by msiexec.exe.

[texas_leaguer]

I apologize if some of my questions are stupid. Everything I do, is via GPO pretty much. Is there a way to use these switches combined with the msi so that they will successfully deploy. What am I missing here?

[RogueSpear]

The best thing to do for GPO deployment is to make .mst tranform files and then select "Advanced" instead of "Assigned" when you add a new .msi file to a GPO. Selecting advanced will allow you to go to the "Modifications" tab and then browse for the .mst file.

If you don't have access to something along the lines of InstallShield AdminStudio (there's a 30 trial) or Wise Package Studio, you could always download the Microsoft Office 2003 Resource Kit Tools (free) and use the Custom Installation Wizard. This isn't really an officially sanctioned use of that product, but it does get the job done. If this is something you see youself doing on a frequent, or at least regular, basis I would suggest hitting your employer up for a premium software package like AdminStudio.

There are some other free tools out there, most of which I have not tried, but if you do a little creative Googling you'll find plenty to chose from.

One concept to keep in mind is this. Almost any command line option you see demonstrated here in the forums, like SERIALNUMBER=1234-5678-0123-4567, is really an entry in the .msi file's table. So instead of using the command line option, which is perfectly suitable for batch file use, you could either modify the .msi file directly OR make an .mst file which is "applied" to the .msi file dynamically at the time of installation. The latter option is considered to be best practice since you're not actually modifying the .msi file itself. I ditched the best practices a while ago and just started to do direct .msi file modification. I'm not saying it's right or better, just saying it's an option.