Creating answer files for silent installs

[Banzai_Joe]

Hi all,

this isn't for windows installs of which there are a million resrouces on the web for.

Now, i'm testing out PQD Deploy, which on the surface seems very good. I'm sick of GPO's failing all over the place.

It installed some software perfectly for me (.exe btw not .msi), but their tech support had to give me an answer file to do it.
I know nothing about answer files, other than they let you set certain commands/switches to enable an unattended install, which is what i need really.

Example,
Yousendit_2.17.exe - outlook plugin.
Need to install it onto 30 machines. Most already have v2.16. Now deploying via PDQ works fine if no prior version is on there. But with a prior version, i think i need to edit the answer file to uninstall or update the previous version.

So....any pointers as to how i can learn about them?
Is prior xml knowledge required?

Any advise would be appreciated as i can't get PDQ the support to keep doing it for me.

Cheers

 

[chaosophy]

Can you edit the answer file they gave you for the other app and see if that is usable? Or can't their support just give you the instructions on doing your own?

Other than that you can try running the installer with /? or -? and see if it has any command line switches and use those. Also a lot of them are just wrapped msiexec so you can check the switches on that as well.

A lot of software will also list it's modify and/or uninstall strings in the registry. So if the installer switches don't let you uninstall/upgrade you could deploy an uninstall first. Or look at deploying a script that does it all.