Product Name Property Change Risk?

[ThomasB]

Hello all,

We are wanting to change the [Product Name] property of our MSI’s , through an MST to reflect the company’s initials. Something along the lines of “Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro (TAB)” adding “(TAB)” to the end of every package we have created. We have hired a company to package several applications for us and in our statement of work we put the requirement to have this added to the completed package.

This company has referenced a forum article (old 2010) about the risk to changing the [Product Name]
Site: http://www.itninja.com/question/productname-change-with-a-transform

• Some vendor MSI’s use product name in setdirectory custom action, which may result in changing the installation location, which in turn may affect functionality.
• Applications requiring any server or hardware connectivity can be impacted by changing the Product Name.
• Applications dependencies may not be recognized as valid if the Product Name is changed.
• Patches may not get installed
• Can cause the issue with the upgrading of the previous versions

I have in turn replied back with a more up to date reference from Microsoft:
Site http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa370857(v=vs.85).aspx

The ProductName property contains the name of the application being installed. This is used only for display purposes. Advertised as a product property.
This property is REQUIRED.
This property can be changed by a transform.

Question: Is anyone aware of any risk to changing the "Product Name" property in an MST file?

Thank you in advance for anything you can offer!

Thomas B

[Evan_Border]

ThomasB wrote:
This company has referenced a forum article (old 2010) about the risk to changing the [Product Name]
Site: http://www.itninja.com/question/productname-change-with-a-transform

• Some vendor MSI’s use product name in setdirectory custom action, which may result in changing the installation location, which in turn may affect functionality.
• Applications requiring any server or hardware connectivity can be impacted by changing the Product Name.
• Applications dependencies may not be recognized as valid if the Product Name is changed.
• Patches may not get installed
• Can cause the issue with the upgrading of the previous versions

Question: Is anyone aware of any risk to changing the "Product Name" property in an MST file?

Thank you in advance for anything you can offer!

Thomas B

The originally cited concerns are valid; though off-hand I find the server/hardware connectivity issue to be a lot less likely. While Microsoft's intent is for the ProductName to serve the narrow purpose of displaying the name, when it comes to scripting and programming you'll see a lot of foolish stuff. There will absolutely occasionally be packages and updates where the vendor makes heavy use of the ProductName property, despite the fact that there are far more effective ways to achieve whatever their goal is.

That said, it should not be a situation that occurs frequently.