1 reply to this topic

[ryan h]

My company is considering purchasing IS Professional 7 to handle the installation of another or our in-house products. Before they make the puchase, they need to know if a merge module created in IS Professional 7 can be used in an IS Developer 7 installation. Here's what we are trying to do. I currently use IS 7.0 Developer to install my team's product. We are hoping that the other team can create a merge module of their installation using IS Pro. 7 which can be integrated into an InstallShield Developer 7 install. Then, we can just add a couple of screens to our install(IS Dev. 7) and include the mm and launch their install from within our install either silently or regularly. If you cannot make sense of this post, please let me know and maybe I can clarify.

Thanks for your help in advance.

Ryan

[Stefan Krueger]

Merge Modules only exist in the Windows Installer (MSI) world. In contrast to the InstallShield Developer product, InstallShield Professional is not based on Windows Installer and therefore cannot create merge modules. Professional can create "objects", but these cannot be used in Developer.
The two tools use completely different technology.

You can create merge modules with Developer, and Developer should be able to consume merge modules created with any other Windows Installer based tool. Why doesn't the other team use Developer instead of Professional?

Please note that a merge module can contain components and custom actions, but no features, so you cannot plug in a complete setup. You can however call a sub install package in a custom action (which in turn could be packaged in a merge module)

(P.S. I have removed your duplicate posts - please avoid cross posting)