PDFCreator as MSI - The never ending story

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We know that the requests for an MSI Installer are coming regularly and that a lot of admins has the need for this. Many users have donated for this and we bought InstallAware some time ago. I have spent more than a month of development time this year to create and MSI Installer with InstallAware.

The actual installation works, but InstallAware's way of passing parameters in silent installs is via command line parameters. Unfortunately, there are no command line parameters when deploying the setup through an Active Directory. The only way to pass parameters is through an MST file. This in turn is not able to change parameters within InstallAware. The suggestions from their side would be to read the path of a settings file from the registry, which could be set via GPO, but this does not appear as a reasonable solution to us.

So we have wasted a lot of time developing something without use for anyone. At the same time, the MSI is only required by admins that are deploying through AD, as other tools allow to deploy EXE setups as well. This still leaves a good amount of admins out there, but it does not affect all admins. We don't know when we can take up our efforts on the MSI topic again, as we are currently planning a lot of improvements and a complete rework on PDFCreator itself.

If anyone should regret having donated money back then, we of course will pay it back. In that case, please just leave a mail with your PayPal address and - if you have it - the Transaction number, so we can refund the money.

I hope that we will not leave you too disappointed here and hope, that we will be able to find a solution for this in the future.