Synergy Hotfix Deployment Consider Producing MSP or Increasing Cadence of MSI
Please consider creating MSP’s or increasing the cadence of your MSI Releases to coincide with hotfixes. While we understand that these are difficult to produce and require extensive testing on your part. However producing either MSP’s or new MSI’s would have several advantages over the current zip/bat deployment process:
- These can be better automated through tooling such as Powershell Desired State Configuration
- These can be better queried as to the state of the machine through utilities such as Powershell Desired State Configuration or utilities that understand the Windows Installer Database.
- Can perform actions such as insertion into the GAC.
- Currently the zip/bat assumes that GACUTIL is present on the box. However for most customer sites this is not installed because its part of the Windows SDK (also ships with the stripped down SDK that comes with Visual Studio) and is not recommended for production sites https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/framework/tools/gacutil-exe-gac-tool.
It also eases distribution skills required.
7/10/2019 1:41 PM 1
This will also register the hotfix version so you can check which version is installed (e.g. in Programs and Features).
8/20/2019 6:29 PM 1
8/22/2019 7:24 PM 1
This processes make it extremely difficult to implement any type of modern change management due to the non-standard nature of the hot fix system.
12/19/2019 4:17 PM 1
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