PDFCreator as MSI - The never ending story

Has anyone got a more modern release of this PDFCreator, greater than V1, as an MSI package?

I've got an old one (v0.93) and successfully deployed to 100+ workstations perfectly via GPOs. I'm now working for another company who require the same thing; but I personally prefer some of the later advancements/features of PDFCreator..  anyone got a recent copy I could 'try'?

admin at simongoodier dot com

It look like the writer philip has very limited understanding of MSI. AD deployment has NO command line options. There is no technical way to add command line options with AD deployment. All customizations of an MSI are made via transforms - always! This is the way how MSI works - there is no other way if it comes to AD deployment. This will also NOT change with WiX.

Everything in an MSI is a feature and features can be installed via command line options. There are also ways to set variables from command line, but this is all ONLY for silent installs and not for AD deployment.

It sounds more like the developers are trying something old fashioned without trying to understand that their mind must change with MSI first. Throw all your knowledge about other installers away and start from scratch. Don't try to bend MSI to archive something that any other installer does in a bad way. *Hell* so many years and still no MSI installer...

I'm part of the team which works on Advanced Installer, an MSI-based setup authoring tool. We recently released a feature which does what you need and more. Basically, you can wrap any existing installer, doesn't matter what type, into an MSI so it can be deployed through Active Directory. It can also create MSI installers from scratch, if you need it.

If you want to try again, contact me or write to support at advancedinstaller dot com so we can talk about your needs. I can also offer you a free license which covers them and free support to help you create the installer.

Active Directory people out there should try deploying using a 'zap' file.  They're simple text files and I've successfully used them to deploy PDF Creator using GP deployment.  See: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/231747 or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZAP_File. 

Have you tried to save the installation as .exe?

Take a look at the InstallAware forum:
http://www.installaware.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=6497
about "Extracting MSI files from EXE"

Aviv Giladi from Installware:
"Simply running a setup extracts everything into %TMP%.
However, files can be extracted directly using any 7ZIP format extractor."

This way you should get the inner .msi.

(This is simular to what InstallShield do)

To make .mst you can use the free software
- Orca by Microsoft
- InstEd by Instedit

Hope this can help to continue the story ...

 Indeed I am! Get in touch with me, dan at aceappsolutions dot co dot uk, and maybe we can work something out?

@packageologist: That sounds great. Our work in progress in done with InstallAware. The complete rewrite probably will have to be done in WiX. Are you experienced with that?

 Hi, I have a great deal of experience in MSI packaging.  If you give me your work in progress I will fix it for you!

The problem is, that you can't edit the MSI setups that are created with InstallAware, as they encapsule the actual setup. Actually, InstallAware produces a MSI installer, puts that into an EXE setup and puts that into an MSI again. And that removes any control over the setup inside.

We now would have to implement something to read all the settings from a known place, which has to be distributed to the PCs somehow.

I agree with the above comment. There are some free tools to edit MSI and change some settings in it. The hardest work is to create the MSI. Why not giving us a general MSI that anyone could edit ? As it was said above, it's already better than nothing. And so, you would not have done so much work for nothing.

Even if it's not ideal, a pacakged MSI + GPO is still better than nothing - you've put in the work so why keep denying those who have the need for it?