Package Visual Studio Setup Project for Silent installation with Group Policy

Question

I have a Visual Studio Setup Project created to install a VSTO application. The Setup Project outputs an EXE and 2 MSI files. One MSI for the VSTO and another MSI for Office Runtime dependency.

I know the setup.exe is used to check for pre-requisites like the office runtime, .NET and others.

However, the group policy User Configuration > Policies > Software Settings > Software Installation only accepts MSI files. How can I package all the three files into one single MSI to perform a silent installation?

Answer 1

It isn't possible to merge prereqs into a single MSI. If you want to support GPO, the only thing you can do is not build the EXE with the prereqs and instead put gating checks in your MSI to verify that they are there. The customer would then have to set up other GPO distirbutions for the prereqs. (Assuming the prereqs are available as MSI, .NET is not. )

In the real world, almost no one uses GPO software distribution. It's too restrictive. They use tools such as SCCM instead. But that's a question for ServerFault not StackOverflow.