Hello:
I have some questions which need to be answered before I make my descision on which product to buy. I cant wait any longer before a new Forum is created so I will ask them here - Sorry!
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I need to know if IA offers Web Updating or software updating?
Does it have any patch management utility?
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I have never used Windows Installers for creating Installations and in the past I have installed softare that said, "you dont have the latest Window Installer files, Please install them prior to installing this program"- now that's scenario I dont want my customers to ever get becasue I sell a retail CD where I cannot rely on the customer having a Internet connection. If someone can explain to me why this happend and how IA can alleviate this problem.
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During the Installation I want to be able to broadcast HTML or Flash Banners/advertiseemts/extra promotions to my customers from a web server if they are connected, The customer does not need to do anything except click through in the normal way. Is it possible to display this content in one of the dialogs? Is it possible to display this content on the background of the installation screen? Is it possible to to RSS Feeds on the dialogs?
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Thanks
Ishana
Pre-Sales Questions
Ishana,
Feel free to use the new forum I just created for your future questions.
Here are my answers:
1) IA offers software updating. It does not have an automated engine which will check for updates on the web. It does not have an incremental patching engine either. It does have an automatic way to seamlessly uninstall old product versions and install new ones. The downside is that the new package must be downloaded in its entirety. The upside is that Windows Installer 3 (advanced patching) is not required - its not available for all Windows platforms. Of course, you can use IA scripting to do much smarter things and even deliver incremental updates, but this behavior is not found out of the box at this time.
2) This problem occurs if the user does not have the Windows Installer runtime installed. IA offers many ways to install the Windows Installer runtime. It can bundle it with the SFX download, put it seperately somewhere else on the web, or put it on your CDs. To me it seems that what you need is to put it directly on the CD. This is no problem - Windows Installer will be automatically and seamlessly installed as part of your "application pre-requisites" if it is not the minimum required version (v2.0).
3) IA has two controls for this purpose: HTML and Flash. The HTML control is not IE-dependent (so the setup runs on all computers) and can parse most of HTML successfully. You can create pages with links to other pages and use it as an interactive billboard during progress dialogs, etc...links on the HTML control which go to external sites (HTTP) will be opened in the users default browser when clicked. The Flash control is a full blown Flash control, so you can do anything you want with it. IA will automatically install Flash on the end-users system before showing the dialog containing the Flash control if necessary. I think therefore you can achieve what you want using either of the controls. If you want to receive live data from a server and display that, you won't be able to do that with the HTML control though...you will probably need to use Flash for it. This is because the content of these controls is included with the installer at build time, they do not download live data from the web and display it. But probably with Flash you could author the data fetching directly into the Flash itself, so that would work.
Please let me know if you have more questions.
Feel free to use the new forum I just created for your future questions.
Here are my answers:
1) IA offers software updating. It does not have an automated engine which will check for updates on the web. It does not have an incremental patching engine either. It does have an automatic way to seamlessly uninstall old product versions and install new ones. The downside is that the new package must be downloaded in its entirety. The upside is that Windows Installer 3 (advanced patching) is not required - its not available for all Windows platforms. Of course, you can use IA scripting to do much smarter things and even deliver incremental updates, but this behavior is not found out of the box at this time.
2) This problem occurs if the user does not have the Windows Installer runtime installed. IA offers many ways to install the Windows Installer runtime. It can bundle it with the SFX download, put it seperately somewhere else on the web, or put it on your CDs. To me it seems that what you need is to put it directly on the CD. This is no problem - Windows Installer will be automatically and seamlessly installed as part of your "application pre-requisites" if it is not the minimum required version (v2.0).
3) IA has two controls for this purpose: HTML and Flash. The HTML control is not IE-dependent (so the setup runs on all computers) and can parse most of HTML successfully. You can create pages with links to other pages and use it as an interactive billboard during progress dialogs, etc...links on the HTML control which go to external sites (HTTP) will be opened in the users default browser when clicked. The Flash control is a full blown Flash control, so you can do anything you want with it. IA will automatically install Flash on the end-users system before showing the dialog containing the Flash control if necessary. I think therefore you can achieve what you want using either of the controls. If you want to receive live data from a server and display that, you won't be able to do that with the HTML control though...you will probably need to use Flash for it. This is because the content of these controls is included with the installer at build time, they do not download live data from the web and display it. But probably with Flash you could author the data fetching directly into the Flash itself, so that would work.
Please let me know if you have more questions.
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