skissinger
Posts: 2119
Score: 134
Joined: 9/13/2001
From: Sherry Kissinger
Status: offline
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Unfortunately, if "ALLUSERS=1" or =2 doesn't produce the behavior you are looking for, the vendor in all likelihood either has absolutely no clue how to create a standard MSI; or they know exactly how to create an MSI and because of how their software works, they know it can only install & run successfully when installed by the user of the machine.
In this day & age, with fewer and fewer companies allowing their users to be local admins, generally I feel the vendor has no clue how to create a standard MSI! You "could" try to create a Transform for their MSI and fix their regkeys & shortcuts -- sometimes that works. Often what I see in these horribly built MSIs is their current user stuff is in a custom action; which you often cannot see inside to fix or adjust.
First line of defense: talk to the vendor. Tell them you deploy via SMS (they may not know what ConfigMgr is), and you need to be able to install the application whether or not a user is logged in, using SYSTEM context, not the logged in user. Occasionally the vendor may have a Public Property that you can use to install (rare, but it happened once for me). A public property is one you can use on the install line, like ALLUSERS= is a standard public property that should govern this behavior. But they might have built in a Public Property called something else. Otherwise, about 50% of the time the vendor will (after a couple of emails/calls from you) build an installation .MSI that uses ActiveSetup & will correctly install under SYSTEM context, and create the hkcu/shortcuts you need. About 50% of the time... you truly get Joe's Basement software; who followed some online guide on making an MSI, but didn't really understand what they were doing.
In those cases... you have 2 options: Install it per-user; because you don't have the time or inclination to repackage. Unfortunately, this may mean that you won't see that installation the same way you see other installations via SMS. Because SMS Hardware Inventory runs under System context, MSI's installed under user context won't be reported completely the same. And down the road, if/when you want to uninstall/reinstall/or upgrade--the only person that can do that is the original logged in user on that computer. If that person is gone from the company, you might have to MSIZAP that guid off the box to clean up.
The other option is to repackage an MSI. Always the very, very last choice. It's better to make a Transform, or make the vendor fix their junk. I've only done that one, ever, and that was after the vendor tried twice to fix their MSI for us. They just made it worse. So we repackaged it ourselves.
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