Category: 7898

Cool!  Might be a neat, new addition to the old toolbelt.

http://legroom.net/software/uniextract

…and, also to those that simply want to join in on the myITforum offer.  So, if you know someone not a regular myITforum.com participant, you may want to forward this information to them, particularly those who want to save the company time and support costs for troublesome applications.

Get your free copy of the whitepaper: “Line of Business Application Monitoring: Best Practices for Ensuring Application Availability and Reliability", by jumping out to the following link and entering a bit of information:

http://www.avicode.com/myitforumoffer.htm

What is it about AVICode? 

Why offer the whitepaper to myITforum.com?

As you know, myITforum.com is the central spot for all things System Center.  This includes applications such as System Center Operations Manager 2007 (OpsMgr or SCOM, as some say).  AVICode has several products available to enhance and extend your OpsMgr 2007 implementation.

• .NET Management Pack – AVIcode’s .NET Management Pack delivers a consolidated view of all .NET applications, featuring health status indicators that identify faulty application components and areas of performance degradation. When a problem is detected, the management pack provides a definitive root cause diagnosis, enabling better problem triage and faster resolution.
• BizTalk Server 2006 Management Pack – AVIcode’s BizTalk Server 2006 Management Pack enables organizations to detect and diagnose problems inside their BizTalk Server custom-built applications. The management pack monitors for security and connectivity problems related to incorrect configuration of BizTalk Adapters, detects failures due to erroneous .NET code within custom-built BizTalk Orchestrations and Pipelines, and helps debug data processing errors inside XSLT transformations.
• Office SharePoint Server 2007 Management Pack -  AVIcode’s Office SharePoint Server 2007 Management Pack detects and diagnoses problems related to custom SharePoint Server-based applications. A complement to the Microsoft SharePoint Management Pack, the AVIcode technology provides deep-dive diagnostics into detected problems within custom-built web parts and BI dashboards, including performance, security, connectivity and application failures. The AVIcode management pack monitors various components of MOSS 2007, including Business Data Catalog and Office Forms Server 2007 activity, Excel Services and Enterprise Search calls. It can diagnose failures due to data inconsistency or incorrect metadata mapping inside a Single Sign On database.
• Reporting Services Management Pack -  AVIcode’s Reporting Services Management Pack provides monitoring for custom-built Reporting Services reports. The Reporting Services Management Pack provides automated discovery and configuration to make monitoring of the activity inside reporting web services easy. It isolates failures related to erroneous SQL statements and data inconsistencies, identifies performance bottlenecks due to long-running queries, and provides extensible reporting on web service usage.

Register for Acresso’s Webinar on July 30th:

http://www.myitforum.com/forums/calendar.asp?eventID=196&caldate=2008-07-30

Windows Installer XML (WIX) is a toolset that builds Windows installation packages from XML source code. The toolset provides a command line environment that developers may integrate into their build processes to build MSI and MSM setup packages.

Project: http://sourceforge.net/projects/wix/

Documentation:  http://www.tramontana.co.hu/wix/

Tutorial:  http://www.dalun.com/wix/01.09.2005.htm

http://www.myitforum.com/absolutenm/templates/?a=5254&z=71

The WinInstall software management application has been passed around like Aunt Betty during early 70’s key party.  But, with the state of the software editing industry right now (*ahem* Acresso/InstallShield), this could be a serious contender of a story to keep monitoring.

And, seriously – who even knew that Attachmate even had it in their software offerings?

Read the press release…

SCALABLE SOFTWARE ACQUIRES WININSTALL FROM ATTACHMATE

Wow…that’s some interesting timing.  Folks are already wondering if the InstallShield brand will survive with the new company, Acresso.  In a lot of eyes, this sounds like poor planning.

However, it looks like, from the release notes for the service pack, that a big part of the service pack release is to add “Beta” Windows Installer 4.5 Support.  Still, as a company that works with Microsoft as a partner on software management technologies, someone should have thought the release through a bit.  It could have saved the company some money and time to wait a couple weeks and release InstallShield 2009 as a full product, SP1 included.

I see it also adds support for Windows Mobile 6.x installation, which is cool.

Read through the SP1 release notes:

http://kb.acresso.com/selfservice/documentLink.do?externalID=Q200150

But, here’s the one that’s gonna make me laugh every time I read it. From the release notes:

Support for Adding the Yahoo!® Toolbar to an Installation to Generate New Sources of Revenue for Your Company

InstallShield includes a new Value-Added Services view that lets you incorporate services in your InstallShield installations and be paid when those services are installed or used, according to the services' terms and conditions.

This release of InstallShield includes support for one value-added service: the Yahoo! Toolbar offering. When you participate in this offering, you add the Yahoo! Toolbar to your installation project through the Value-Added Services view. After your end users install the Yahoo! Toolbar with your product, you get paid for every time that they use the Yahoo! Toolbar.

This support is available in the following project types: Basic MSI, InstallScript, InstallScript MSI, and Web.

Its funny on its own.  But, with the shape of Yahoo (stock down, execs flooding the exits, stock holders wanting action)…we’ll see if this turns out to be a good partnership for Acresso or not. 

Just so we’re keeping track, that’s 2 questionable things here shortly for the new company: 1) Yahoo toolbar inclusion and, 2) extremely short service pack cycle.  And, who knows what the “actual” story is about the split from Macrovision earlier this year.  It all just seems “funny”.  Not funny ha-ha, but funny strange.

BTW: Here’s the download page for the service pack:

http://kb.acresso.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&externalId=Q200241&sliceId=

And, the direct download:

http://saturn.installshield.com/product/is/2009/domestic/sp1/Update.exe

Interesting quote from the article…

"Microsoft had selected InstallAware as a launch partner on their first-ever coupled beta program – for the beta 1 milestone of Windows Installer 4.5 in October 2007," says Agustín K-ballo Bergé, Vice President of Research and Development at InstallAware Software Corporation. "We are proud to be working together with Microsoft in delivering our customer base the latest innovations in technology at breakneck speed. It should come as no surprise that we are the first install vendor to support the final released version of MSI 4.5."

Read the rest…

http://www.myitforum.com/absolutenm/templates/IndustryNews.aspx?articleid=5079&zoneid=71

Funny but true.  How many times have you wanted to post something like this?

Installshield – great for developers, sucks *** for victims (aka everyone else)

ScriptLogic Releases MSI Studio for Systems Center Configuration Manager Which Works Seamlessly with Microsoft Systems Center to Simplify MSI-Based Application Deployment

Read the full press release…

http://www.myitforum.com/absolutenm/templates/IndustryNews.aspx?articleid=5078&zoneid=71

 

Acresso’s (new InstallShield company) big announcement for their new version was that it will allow you to distribute the Yahoo Toolbar (all admin’s say *yay*).  ScriptLogic’s announcement is that they are releasing a version that is useful to System Center customers.

Uhhh…