Produce .exe and .msi with InstallShiled Basic MSI

Question

I'm trying to produce a single release from an InstallShield 2011 simple MSI project that suits different types of users. I have an application which is dependant on .Net Framework 2. So I know that this can't be installed by a plain msi but requires an exe. However, I have seen installations made with Visual Studio where the final release contains an exe that deals with prerequisites plus an msi which the exe also runs for the rest of the stuff to be set up.

We have some customers who want a simple exe type installation, but other customers that want to repackage the msi in their own deployment system and are fully aware that .NET Framework must also be installed. These customers are completely adamant that they'll accept nothing other than an MSI.

In Installshield 11 with all the release settings I've tried, I can't get the Visual Studio type setup. I either get just an MSI and an error about prerequisites or just an exe without its underlying MSI, whe trying to package as a Network Image. I can get an exe and msi if I use CD-ROM,DVD etc. as media type but then I also get cab files, so that doesn't solve the problem. Cache MSI locally in the release settings seems to make no difference.

I really don't want to have 2 different installer projects for different customers. Does anyody know of a solution to this problem?

Answer 1

You can define 2 different product configurations and build it two different ways for your user stories.

Alternatively, you can build it as an EXE and provide instructions to your customers on how to decompose the EXE into it's prereqs and MSI for their own uses. I've worked in Enterprise IT shops where we want tools like SCCM to chain the packages together and it's common knowledge how to achieve this when then vendor provides a self extracting exe driven MSI.