Delivering Unprecedented Support for Distributed Teams, Software Suite Packaging and Enterprise Deployments
New suite installations, collaboration tools, software tagging, and graphical interface support sophisticated software producers, their agile teams, and “app-store savvy” end-users
Maidenhead, UK – August 23, 2011 - Flexera Software, the leading provider of strategic Application Usage Management solutions for application producers and their customers, today announced the launch of InstallShield 2012. InstallShield is the global de facto installation development solution on more than 500 million PCs, supporting traditional and agile development teams with their Windows and Virtualization installation requirements.
Installation Collaboration for Agile Development Teams
“Installation development used to be an isolated, tactical step at the tail end of an application development process and was managed by a dedicated team member,” commented Maureen Polte, senior director of product management at Flexera Software. “Today, however, it must be integrated into agile development practices, where installation responsibilities are distributed amongst the team and are an essential element of the iterative, development process. InstallShield 2012 is the only world-class installation solution supporting the sophisticated installation authoring, building and bundling requirements of today’s decentralized, agile teams.”
The InstallShield 2012 Collaboration add-on supports distributed, collaborative installation development by allowing product developers and technical writers to create and manage their portion of the installation. A new project type called Developer Installation Manifest (DIM), a feature-sized collection of related items such as product files, shortcuts, registry entries, text file changes, IIS Web sites, and other elements, together make up a discrete portion of a product installation. A new Developer Installation Manifest (DIM) Editor can be separately installed and used by the product development team to create and manage their installation files. The installation developer can then link the developer’s DIM project to the product’s Basic MSI project, eliminating the time consuming need for the installation developer to have to work with individual development team members to get the their product installation details.
“Agile software development is key to our global product strategy, and implementing a strategic installation solution that supports agile development is critical,” said Mark Hanson, software engineer advanced at Siemens Product Lifecycle Management Software Inc. “Flexera Software has listened and has delivered InstallShield 2012, a game-changing product that offers tremendous functionality for our agile team to integrate installation development into our processes and support our iterative, collaborative team.”
New Support for Complex Suite Installations
“Software producers are highly sophisticated when developing, packaging and distributing their software products,” said Polte. “It’s critical that they are able to offer products to the market as standalone offerings or bundled suites, while creating a unified installation experience.”
InstallShield 2012’s Suite Installation feature makes it easy to bundle multiple products together into a single, unified installation – eliminating the need to develop a complex custom launcher or bootstrapper application. The Suite Installation uses a new, next-generation setup launcher (Setup.exe) to conditionally run multiple installations (.msi or .exe) and apply Windows Installer patches (.msp) as needed on target systems. An entirely new end-user interface, with redesigned, modern built-in wizard pages and a new wizard page editor supports the development of a graphic-intensive experience for “app-store savvy” users, and provides more control over the layout of any page. Moreover, InstallShield 2012’s Suite project type brings together both 32-bit packages and 64-bit packages in one suite installation, running only the appropriate packages on each target system, thereby eliminating the complex coding involved in creating custom suite installers.
"InstallShield 2012’s new Suite tool offers us a convenient way of integrating redistributable packages of the Microsoft products MS.NET or MS Visual Studio into the setups of our software solutions, such as our new RIB iTWO Business Suite for digital engineering and construction,” said Johannes John, senior setup developer at RIB Software AG. “All in all a promising supplement for the development of RIB software systems."
Application Tagging Supports Customers’ Software Compliance Efforts
Software “self-instrumentation” or software tagging is evolving as an industry standard, enabling software producers to create smarter applications that give enterprise customers better information about the software they are running. Towards that end, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has established ISO 19770-2 – specifications for tagging software, to optimize software identification and management. InstallShield 2012 is the only strategic installation development solution that creates ISO 19770-2 software identification tags as part of the installation development process. This enables software producers to help their customers by delivering better visibility into their installed software estate to facilitate software asset management and software compliance efforts. “Enterprise software users have grown more sophisticated about compliance management and license optimization, so they want their software producers to make it easier for them to track, manage and optimize their software utilization,” said Polte.
Resources:
Learn more about InstallShield 2012
Sign up for InstallShield 2012 Webinar
Learn more about Flexera Software’s Installation Solutions
Subscribe to Flexera Software’s InstallTalk Blog
Access InstallShield White Papers
Access InstallShield Case Studies
Access Free Trials of InstallShield
