KB18667: Common mistakes and important details to consider when implementing a silent installation, upgrade, or un-install of the MicroStrategy 10.x platform for a Microsoft Windows environment

Level of Support
 
Strategy Technical Support is available to help with and troubleshoot the configuration of the response.ini and setup.iss files. Strategy Technical Support is also willing to help with configuring and troubleshooting the actual installation command need to trigger the silent installation. However, this is the limitation of how far Strategy Technical Support will go with helping implement the silent installation. This means a Technical Support Engineer will not help with configuring or troubleshooting a batch file, SMS deployment, third party script or application deployer, or anything else outside of the level of support stated in the beginning of this paragraph.
 
Common Mistakes and Oversights
As a warning, configuring a silent installation or uninstallation of the Strategy 10.x platform generally takes several attempts before the implementation is configured properly. It is advised to set up a test machine to try out the silent install before implementing it into a rollout infrastructure.
 
Below are the five most common mistakes/oversights, and the associated solutions, that occur during setup/configuration of a silent installation:
 
Problem: When only using a response.ini file, the Install Shield window is still displayed.
Solution: The response.ini file only automates and makes the Strategy installation selection screens silent, not the Install Shield application. To make the entire installation silent a setup.iss file is needed to configure the silent functionality for the Install Shield.
 
Problem: Users do not name the file "response.ini".
Solution: Naming the file "response.ini" is crucial. The installer looks for a file by that name exactly, and will not read a file that is named differently.
 
Problem: Users have the response.ini file in a location other than the location of the setup.exe installer files.
Solution: The response.ini file needs to be in the same location as the setup.exe installation file. The silent installation functionality of the Strategy installer is only programmed to look within the same folder as the setup.exe file.
 
Problem: Users have the reponse.ini file and setup.iss file in the same folder or directory.
Solution: If both files are in the same location as the setup.exe, the setup.iss will be used in place of the response.ini file. To use both, the setup.iss should be stored in a location different than the response.ini and setup.exe files. Unlike the response.ini file, there is no directory location requirement on the setup.iss file. The Install Shield can locate the setup.iss file in any specified directory.
 
Problem: Users confuse the Strategy.exe with setup.exe in the 8.1.x line.
Solution: Starting in 8.1.0 there is an extra file called "Strategy.exe". This file launches a flash version of the installer and acts as another way for users to install the Strategy software. Unfortunately, silent installs via the response.ini file do not work with this flash application, only with the actual setup.exe file location in the Installations folder.
 
Important Details and Concepts
There are several concepts and pieces of information users must take into account when designing and implementing a silent installation or un-installation of the Strategy platform.
 

1. An installation must be performed under an account which has administrative privileges on the target machine. Administrator level permissions are required to register the necessary libraries, services, and modify the registry locations associated with the Strategy 8.x platform. Failure to install with an administrator account may result in the Strategy 8.x platform behaving unexpectedly, if running at all.
2. If a modification or un-install of an existing installation occurs, where the original installation was performed with as a silent install, then the original response.ini file needs to be moved to a different location or renamed. Any triggering of the setup.exe file when the response.ini file is still present in the same location will result in repeating the original silent installation per the settings in the file.
3. If an entry in the response.ini file is removed, the default setting for that entry will be used. For example:
   ### Components To Install (TRUE) or Remove (FALSE) ###
   DesktopAnalystSelect=TRUE
   
4. In this example, 'TRUE' is the default setting for which components are selected to be installed. If the 'DesktopAnalystSelect=TRUE' line is removed from the response file, the component will still be installed when the installation occurs. If it is desired to remove a component the setting needs to be changed to 'FALSE' instead of simply removing it.
5. Hotfixes can be silently installed separately from the GA installation. However, hotfixes cannot be silently un-installed separately. A silent un-install will remove the GA version of the Strategy 8.x platform, along with the installed hotfix.
6. If a component is already installed on a machine and a silent upgrade is performed with that component set to 'FALSE', then that component will be removed from the machine. The 'FALSE' setting is equivalent to un-checking a component in the installation GUI, where checked means the component will be installed or remain installed, and unchecked means it will be removed.

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