Hi
I'm currently evaluating InstallAware V7 for use in a fairly large corporate company.
I have a situation whereby the company's application versioning strategy does not seem to work with the Windows Installer versioning strategy. I'm quite new to Windows Installer installations and would appreciate some thoughts.
The company works on a release basis where we have a set release once every quarter during the year. At the beginning of the year they would start with a new major version of their apps i.e. V2.0.0 and then for each subsequent release (minor and emergency) increment the other version numbers accordingly. During each release we patch the existing apps with the files that changed because we need to keep the patches as small as possible for web deployment (using a fairly old version of install shield and RTPatch).
The problem I have is that as soon as we change from V2.x.x to V3.x.x according to windows installer we need to do a new upgrade. We cannot afford to force users to download a new upgrade of +/- 30Mb when the major version changes as our users have very limited band width and some are in very remote areas. We are doing nothing different during major version changes to what happens for small upgrades/patches. The patches are usually between 1 and 4Mb. We operate in an environment where the users can choose to use competitor’s products for sales instead of ours and we do not want to give them ammo to do this as a result of upgrade problems. My question is: How do I upgrade an app from V2.x.x to V3.x.x by only upgrading the required changed files without having to deploy a full new installation?
