Advanced Installer Features - Patches
Your ability to address customer issues in a timely and
cost-effective manner is crucial to your product's success. Using
Advanced Installer patches you can quickly create and
distribute application fixes and improvements.
By providing patches instead of full-blown installers you (and
your users) will save considerable bandwidth expenses. Windows Installer
uses powerful, file-type aware, binary diff algorithms to ensure the
smallest patch size.
Small, incremental patching is less disruptive and easier
accepted by users. Advanced Installer builds only standard, system
administrator friendly MSI patches which can be pushed through
GPO to automatically patch applications on thousands of computers
spread throughout large organizations.
Easily create Patches
Using Advanced Installer's Patch Wizard, simply
select the old and new installers of your application and in just a
few clicks your patch is generated and ready to be deployed.
Additional settings are available for advanced users to
further customize patches, like:
- multi-target patches - update multiple versions of a product
- patch sequencing (from WI 3.0) - ensure correct order of
application
Your users can quickly be notified of, download and install your
product's patches through Advanced Installer's Auto Updater.
Patches in
Add/Remove Programs
Starting with Windows Installer 3.0, patches
are supported by the Add/Remove Programs applet in the Control Panel.
You can show your users more information about the patch and offer a
way of removing it. You can classify your patch as a
hotfix, security rollup, critical update, update, service pack or
update rollup.
Patch
validation
When creating a patch, Advanced Installer always runs sets of
pre- and post-build checks to make sure Windows Installer
patch rules are met, in order to help you create a
valid working patch. Potential issues, if found, are
signaled as early as possible.
Digitally
signed Patches
Digital Signatures can be applied to your
patches with just a few clicks, certifying your package's origin and
integrity and putting your customer's mind at ease.
By signing patches you can enable least-privileged user
account patching without UAC elevation prompts on Windows Vista.
Advanced Installer - Features
