Convert .wsi to .ism possible?

[Lou_Elston]

Being that Symantec has announced that sales of WIS 7 would be discontinued this month and that no new support agreements would be sold, can you use AdminStudio to convert a Wise (.wsi), project to an Installshield (.ism), project file? If so, has anyone done this, and how well does this work? Is this documented anywhere? Using an example of a large project installer that basically imports a lot of merge modules, would you start with the merge modules?

[Alpesh]

Hi Lou,

Try opening the .wsi project in Repackager. We do have support to open the .wse project files. It may work for .wsi files as well. I have not personally tried this though.

I hope this helps.

Thanks,
Alpesh

[Lou_Elston]

My understanding (after talking to the the sales staff of both AdminStudio and InstallShield 2010), is that InstallShield 2010 has the repackage utility included in it now. When you download the evaluation copy, this is not included, it is only included when you actually purchase Installshield 2010 premium. Anyway, their recommendations were to download AdminStudio as that has the same repackage tool.

I did this and used the repackage tool to open a .MSI file created by a WISE installer. I then selected the option that used the Wise .MSI file to do an install, and then create both the InstallShield .ISM and MSI output files. Unless I did something wrong, this is a waste of time, it basically just creates a shell using the same product name, version, etc of the wise installer. The system searches were not brought over, the merge modules and their custom actions were not there, it does not set the INSTALLDIR to what it was in the wsi file. nothing of the wsi script actions were brought over. The Wise installer msi file that I used for this first test did not have any files in it (just merge modules), so i cannot testify as to whether or not it would have brought them over.

Did I do something wrong, or is this just the way it is (in which case the repackage tool is a bust as far converting Wise installer projects to Installshield projects, and it looks like I will have to start building Installshield projects from scratch)?

[stefanwey]

Hi Lou

I had the same problem, but I could resolve it with the help of the Flexera support. Here's their answer:

Thank you for your email, As the project you sent me is a Wise project (WSI) you can convert this using the InstallShield tool (part of AdminStudio), First of all you need to open the WSI file with Installshield (Right Click the file and then open with and point to InstallShield isdev.exe),

Once this is opened do a ‘Save As’ and save this as an MSI, Once you have an MSI, Open Installshield and follow the steps in the following KB article to convert this into an InstallShield project,

HOWTO: Create an InstallShield Project from an Existing MSI/MSM File
http://kb.flexerasoftware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&externalId=Q200261


Attention! my problem was that I worked with the InstallShield 2011 evaluation version. You have to use the InstallShield in the AdminStudio 9.5 evaluation ???!!!

If you already have an MSI you can omit the first steps for converting, just follow the steps in the kb article. In Wise 5.21 I saved my WSI as MSI and started with thisone.

I hope this help,
Stefan