WinINSTALL has provided one of the few point and click packaging solutions for many years. The WinINSTALL MSI Packager has been used by tens of thousands of IT administrators worldwide. There are many new features for packaging with WinINSTALL and the Desktop Availability Suite and for the first time with any solution available today packaging is completely integrated with what is really running on the desktop not just what exists in packages that have been created.

Features of the WinINSTALL Desktop Management Suite and the Desktop Availability Suite MSI Packager

• Conflict Assessment – allows package contents to be compared providing results that show where conflicts exist between packages. Where OnDemand goes beyond any competitor is the relationship of package contents, conflict assessment results and real fine inventory in our database. What does this mean? You now have the ability to compare a machines file inventory with MSI package contents and conflict assessment results to truly understand where conflicts truly hide.
  
  Every other packaging solution wants you to believe that if you check for conflicts between packages, test those MSI packages, and have a good process for MSI package creation that your installations are guaranteed to run. This is impossible without a comparison to the actual state of the machine. How would you know that installation is guaranteed to work?  Packaging has always had an impact on the desktop even before MSI. Now with OnDemand the integration is real and knowing what changes to the environment your MSI packages are really going make and create can only save useless calls to your helpdesk after package installation. Throw away your packaging only solution and upgrade to MSI packaging with knowledge.
  
  
• MSI Validation and Automatic Correction – allows the validation of MSI packages against standards such as the Microsoft Logo Certification. Potentially dangerous ICE errors are detected and can be automatically repaired.
• Baselining – allows an archived baseline image to be used in the WinINSTALL Discover before Snapshot to speed package creation dramatically.
• New Patch Wizard – makes creating MSP or Patch files easier than ever.
• Supports point and click automatic creation of MST (transforms) and MSM (merge modules).
• MSI Package editing is logically laid out in the WinINSTALL 8.5 and Desktop Availability Suite console and doesn’t require scripting or conversion which always presents the risk of accuracy in MSI packaging.
• OnDemand products support the use of VMWare for MSI package creation to easily use virtual machines to build and test packages.
• The WinINSTALL 8.6 MSI Packager Professional Edition is licensed per console. A console license is required for each person involved with building and editing MSI packages. Or have an unlimited MSI package creation capability with the full WinINSTALL 8.6 product and reap the benefits of packaging integrated with file inventory and start lowering the costs associated with resolving software problems caused by MSI package installation.

WinINSTALL continues to support the NAI native WinINSTALL package format that provides a great deal of flexibility when MSI just can’t get the job done. A large number of variables are available with NAI as well as many command line switches.