InstallAware

What do you like best?

Very effective and easy to use - indispensable component of our agile DevOps toolkit. Virtually no learning curve. First setup builder that compiled packages which successfully installed on a hardened client environment that no other installer could handle (we went through six others, each before their own intrinsic problems, before finally discovering InstallAware). Blows literally all other vendors out of the water. It is hard to understand how other setup kits can remain in business with such poor technology in comparison to InstallAware. Even their licensing is so much cleaner - there's no license server to install or configure, everything just works. It's as if this is the Apple of all MSI tools! Save yourself a good load of grief and go with InstallAware.

What do you dislike?

We may run into trouble some point down the road, but hasn't happened thus far in almost a decade (8 years of use).

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Go with the Studio edition, it has served us well over the years.

Be sure to get at least 2 years of maintenance with support for the best value when ordering.

If you extend your maintenance before allowing it to lapse, they will give you unbelievable discounts.

Never shy away from upgrading, as I have yet to see an InstallAware upgrade to break a setup project!

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Installers were always a pain point for us and frustrated our customers, resulting in lost sales, and even existing clients.

We couldn't come up with a successful web delivery/e-commerce strategy before discovering the flexibility of InstallAware.

We lost two integration engineers due to other installation platforms which were, in hindsight, defective by design.

We had to build tens of installation packages to support all our product combinations - the maintenance of which was a growing nightmare.

We even had to fly out engineers to client sites on occasion, at our expense, to get packages built with other brands to work.

Every new Windows version release was a nightmare, requiring major retesting and re-engineering.

The worst was our first installer of choice actually opened us up to liability due to unsolicited changes it made on client Desktops, which compromised their security and created an attack surface that was exploited.

It was inconceivable to us that these problems were not inherent to the Windows platform before learning about InstallAware.

Now we maintain just a single package that runs successfully on all known Windows versions, as well as all Windows architectures (arm, 64bit, 32bit).

This has cut our integration costs dramatically, and it is also telling that we haven't had turnover in our integration department since our upgrade to InstallAware!

To date (8 years and counting), no setup of ours has every been broken by a Windows update - or created any attack surface on any client network and/or PC.

InstallAware is at the heart of our ecommerce strategy, with instant fulfillment at installation time.