Administrative Installation

Administrative installation is a feature of Microsoft Windows Installer that allows you to install a source image of an application on a network share. Users in a workgroup who have access to the network share can then install the application from the source image.

The User Interface Editor allows you to specify a different set of installation dialog boxes that will be displayed when an administrator installs the application to a network share via the command line using the /a command-line option (msiexec /a installername).

For example, you might want to allow the administrator to choose a standard installation location that cannot be overridden by end users. To do this, you would remove the Installation Folder dialog box from the Install section of the User Interface Editor, but leave it in the Administrative Install section. When the administrator runs the administrative installation, they can set the location; that location is stored and used by Windows Installer whenever the application is installed from the network share.

Note   When installing an application via administrative installation, bootstrapping application files (the files that install Windows Installer, if needed) are not copied to the server even if the Bootstrapper property is set to Windows Installer Bootstrapper. If the bootstrapping application files are required for installation, you will need to manually copy the files Instmsia.msi, Instmsiw.msi, Setup.exe, and Setup.ini to the server. These files can be found in the same directory as the .msi file for your application.

See Also

User Interface Management in Deployment | Administrative Installation (Windows Installer)