Just Thoughts

It’s very tricky to automate and silently push and install an application package across a network, especially if it’s not Microsoft.

Windows Installer package (.msi), is for installations on Microsoft windows. You can extract .exe files aimed for Windows platforms to view the .msi

There is a tool from Microsoft, Orca, to edit .msi, it displays properties and their values, it’s quite a headache to modify the values, and if you aren’t familiar with the whole installation procedure and do not know what you are doing, you can cause serious problems that may leave your system in an unstable state and the application not installed properly.

There is always a document explaining what needs to be modified to suit your needs, of course, if it is Microsoft, it’s straight forward, the field to enter the product key, company name, but what about other products, such documentation isn’t always available.

You can guess out the property values but you don’t want to risk it. I found this nice site, that was very helpful AppDeploy.

It’s all about package deployment and software distribution. Huge knowledge base with lots of helpful information categorized, command lines, discussion, under each application package.

One thing I faced and didn’t quite figure a correct way to do it, is sometimes the application installs an add-in onto another application, browser or outlook for example, the installation will fail if those were not closed. You can either issue a command to kill that application process and then run the new application installer or notify the users to shut everything down because new installations will be pushed to them.