New Repackaging Tool

AdminStudio SMS Edition, a free utility released Sept. 2004, provides a full set of tools to repackage existing software for silent installation with Systems Management Server (SMS), tackling an important limitation of SMS.

As valuable as SMS is for deploying software centrally and automatically, software installation under SMS is still far from easy, mainly because the actual installation process is not handled by SMS. (See the sidebar “Software Installation Still Tricky” on page 16 of the Nov. 2003 Update.) SMS requires software to install “silently,” without user input for configuration options such as the install path. Many applications installed by Microsoft’s Windows Installer service (also known as the Microsoft Installer, or MSI) support such silent installations and thus work well with SMS. However, using SMS to silently deploy older software and other applications that do not use MSI can be difficult.

Most organizations tackle this problem today through a process called “repackaging,” in which a developer or administrator creates a customized application installation package that, when executed by SMS or other deployment techniques, will silently install the application in the desired configuration. Repackaging tools generally take a snapshot of the state (files and Registry settings) of a test system before the application is installed, take another after the application is installed manually, and then use the detected file and Registry changes to automatically build a new installation package. These packages must frequently be tweaked to account for things like Registry changes that occurred during the process that were unrelated to the application installation.