6 replies to this topic

[dathay]

All,

My company is thinking of making the move over to basic MSI installs (with serious proding from yours truly). Something that has comeback to me is how this might effect call volumn for the support group. My own thought is that it will drive it down but I can't say that unequivecally.

What have you seen in your own companies? Did moving to MSI result in lower call volumn for the install? How much of your call volumn is attributed to install in the first place? Enquiring minds want to know!!!

--David Athay

[VBScab]

I guess that depends on how you're currently installing.

The environment I left in the summer was driven by VB Scripts with the aid of in-house components (for permissioning etc). The Engineering Group were pushing for a move to MSI. In the MSI test phase, business units were distinctly unimpressed with how much longer MSI-based installs took compared to the VB Script-based equivalent. An informal test of 12 apps undertaken by our group showed that, on average, the MSI-based version took 3 times longer to install. We resisted but Engineering had the ears of the "right" people and the deed was done, contracts signed, etc. Only then did they discover that the distribution tool they chose doesn't handle transform files (LOL...great testing, guys). That's another story, though.

Until the decision to fully go MSI, MSIs had been accomodated by wrapping the call to MSIExec in a VB Script wrapper and authoring transforms to, for example, always install silently and for ALLUSERS. There were no significant differences in the number of calls involving wrapped MSIs than native VB Script installs: users (and support personnel) were as ignorant about blaming the install on issues which turned out to be application-based irrespective of the delivery mechanism.

[Stefan Krueger]

[antyagi]

Due the reason quoted by Stefan, only initialization time should be affected (i think so). So instead of saying "took 3 times longer to install", you should say "took 3 times longer to initialize setup".
And that too should happen on WinXP onwards only.

[VBScab]

In a trading environment (and probably in most other environments), the user doesn't CARE for the semantics of the language. All he/she cares about is the fact that his/her machine is out of action for 3 times longer than it would otherwise be.

[Glytzhkof]

I agree VBScab, however the rollback feature of MSI adds extra protection against failed or half completed installs. Failed installs could potentially cause a lot more down time than the MSI install.

[Stefan Krueger]

How long does your initialization phase take? Do you launch the .msi file directly, or using setup.exe? A verbose log file might tell you what actions take place begind the scenes.
During MSI initialization (i.e. before the Welcome dialog is displayed) Windows Installer performs any AppSearch actions you defined in the msi file (which can take very long of you search the whole hard disk for instance). It also resolves the directory tree for your installatiion (which might take a while is you have many directories) and computes disk space requirements (which can take long of you have many files).
There may also be custom actions during this phase that can take long, like installing MDAC. Or, if you are launching your setup using setup.exe it might even be installing the latest MSI runtime, .NET Framework, MSDE 2000 etc. during that phase.

Creating the system restore point happens after the dialogs and before the actual file copy starts. Creating backup copies for rollback happen during the copy phase.