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I have created a program in Autohotkey, which creates a few shortcut keys that a whole company with 400 people wants to have installed permanently. The way I imagine the program to work is that a shortcut to the program is added to the Start menu under the Startup folder, so it is automatically and transparently started when the computer is started. The program will keep running all day.
I am a freelancer with no access to the IT department, but indirectly I have seen emails that they insist on that I have to create an MSI file in order to roll the program out onto all these computers. The first issue I have with creating an MSI package is that I do not know how an MSI file can be created based on an .EXE file. The second is that they say that it is very costly for them to create such a file (I believe that means that it costs something like 20.000$ to get it done), therefore they do not want to make frequent updates, while I believe it is essential to be able to quickly adjust the program to new needs and fix bugs.
On Wednesday, I will have a meeting with them, and I would therefore like to know what kind of arguments they might have for using MSI packages, and why they could not simply create a shortcut to my .EXE file on all these computers (this should not be too hard, should it?). The shortcut should point to the .EXE file, which is located on a file-server so one can simply replace it to update the program (the computers always have access to the file-servers, meaning that there are no laptops).
What could their arguments be?
2I have to be honest and say my gut is telling me that this is not really the right question for a SU, although it is well thought out. This is more an administration issue, and I am not entirely sure where it will fit to be honest. I am not closing it thought, I will leave it to the community to decide, just raising my concerns. – BinaryMisfit – 2011-10-10T08:49:25.373
If your installation program is pretty simple, and I think it is, then WiX Toolset is a good candidate. Follow the tutorial to get it done.
– Alexey Ivanov – 2011-10-10T18:45:34.517