Best Practices/Advice on deploying .exe setups

Question

We have a couple applications (office, mcafee) that need to be deployed thru .exe. We also have some MSI applications. The msi's work great as Windows can control and know when they are done. What is anyone's advice on making .exe setups run and stopping other zen bundles from starting before that setup is complete?

Answer 1

For such cases, you may need to get a little tricky and use VBS or
another scripting tool (Autoit) that would be launched by ZCM to call
the wrapper app and then also monitor the chained app.
A "Monitor Modules" feature as existed in ZDM7 would really help.
If anyone is actually struggling with "Wrappers", just let me know and I
can whip up a tool to help. I used to have one I even used in ZDM7
since even monitor modules did not always help.
On 12/16/2013 10:46 AM, kjhurni wrote:
>
> craig_wilson;2297895 Wrote:
>> Change the Option from "No Wait" to "When action is complete" for "Wait
>> before Proceeding to the Next Action" on your launch executable action.
>>
>>
>> On 12/15/2013 5:16 PM, dabarnett wrote:
>>>
>>> We have a couple applications (office, mcafee) that need to be
>> deployed
>>> thru .exe. We also have some MSI applications. The msi's work great
>> as
>>> Windows can control and know when they are done. What is anyone's
>> advice
>>> on making .exe setups run and stopping other zen bundles from
>> starting
>>> before that setup is complete?
>>>
>>>
>
> To add to what Craig says, the "wait" action only works if the setup.exe
> doesn't launch a bunch of other things, and exit the original wrapper
> (ie: setupvse.exe for McAfee VSE Enterprise).
>
> setupvse.exe is an installation wrapper that then launches msiexec.exe
> and it (the setupvse.exe) promptly unloads from memory about 2-3 seconds
> after it starts/launches (you can see this via procmon or whatever it's
> called now), so ZCM thinks it's done, and continues onto the next app,
> whilst msiexec.exe continues on it's merry way setting up VSE
> Enterprise.
>
> And McAfee doesn't support running the .MSI for their stuff (it won't
> install properly or any of your custom settings if you use the MID
> either).
>
>