Reduces support cost of misconfiguration of organization-specific settings by end-users.
Provides network administrators more choice for mass deployments
Description
If your application proves as popular as you hope it will be, chances are that a large organization that will want to use some kind of software deployment mechanism. With increasing corporate focus on lowering TCO, it’s vital that you ensure your application is deployable using common methods.
Deployability means many things to many people. Sometimes that means using tools such as Systems Management Server or architecture such as Active Directory, sometimes it can be as simple as a network share point or CD media for mobile users. As a baseline, you should make sure that you application has the following capabilities
Support Advertising All Microsoft® Windows® Installer-based packages must be advertisable in a manner that operating system entry points, such as shortcut activation and file activation, can trigger install on demand. See the Windows 2000 Application Specification for more details.
Support Running with No UI In a typical deployment scenario, administrators often don’t want install UI popping up all over the place. Make sure that you support running with a suppressed user interface.
Support administrative installation The Windows Installer can perform an administrative installation of an application or product to a network for use by a workgroup. An administrative installation installs a source image of the application onto the network that is similar to a source image on a CD-ROM. Users in a workgroup who have access to this administrative image can then install the product from this source. Administrators can run an administrative installation from the command line by using the /a option described in Command Line Options.
Support Running from read-only sources Running from read-only sources such as CD-ROMs, DVDs and read-only LAN directories is useful in small organizations that don’t use any tools to distribute their software. If your program is designed to run from the distribution CD it needs to have a full install of the program on the CD with an install program to point to that location.