InstallAware

I'm trying to allow our application to be installed to a shared network location. The idea is the customer runs our websetup from their "server" computer, and then each user instead of installing a local copy just runs the shared copy i.e. \\server\targetdir\application.exe. Our application is .dll/.ocx free (i.e. it supports an "xcopy" install) so there is no worry about local copies of any objects. All the install would really have to do is just create the shortcuts/menu entries/file associations needed for the application and point to the shared drive.

I guess this is kind of similar to an Advertised shortcut but I don't want anything copied locally. Forcing each user to run the install and specify the shared path to install into i.e. \\server\targetdir would probably work but I really don't want to download and overwrite those copies while another user could be using the product. In Windows installer it looks like you can set entire features to be Advertised or not but it looks like you can only set individual shortcuts in InstallAware? There is also a Windows Installer ADDSOURCE property that looks exactly like what I need but it doesn't seem to be exposed through the InstallAware interface anywhere. Maybe I can't do a websetup and would have to do something like copy an "Uncompressed Directory Layout" to the server computer first but I still don't see any way to fource the objects to be run-from-source.

This seems like a pretty typical installation scenario - I'm surprised but I can't find any examples that look like this so maybe I am just missing something? Any help/ideas people have would be much appreciated, thanks.

Dear aecspades,

So basically what you are looking at doing is having a your installed software on a network shared location?

There is no real way in avoiding installing local files and registry entries - that is how the InstallAware engine works..

Correct, what I want to do is have my software installed on a network shared location. I don't mind if the install creates registry settings on each machine - our software also uses the registry to store "per-user" settings, but I don't want local copies of the program installed on each user's machine. A single copy of the software on a shared drive makes maintenance for the entire network trivial (since only a single copy needs to be updated) and is a big selling point of our product. The windows installer seems to support "run from source" so why wouldn't this be possible? I can also specify an install to a network drive so the end result is exactly what I want (multiple users can run from the same shared network location) the only issue there would be installing to the shared drive while the program was in use by another user - all that InstallAware would need to do skip the copying of the files themselves while creating Start Menu shortcuts and the file associations in the registry.

Dear aecspades,

What you can do is create two installers.
Create one main installer that installs everything as well as the actual program to the network share.
Then, create another installer which will be the same as the previous one minus the installed files.

Will that work for you?