how many people in the world using this software?

[hnyb89]

Installanywhere is very good so how many people in over the world are using it ? can you guess?

[Macintosh]

No idea, may be 100 (After seeing the community posts)

[pv7721]

The exact number is known only by Flexera Software, and I guess they won't make it public. IMHO the number should be far higher than that. There are plenty of users that use it without any problem whatsoever, so they never use the forums (or use only support).

[rmilbrath]

Flexera operates an interesting business model to say the least.

Product Pricing
For what the product does, does not do, and how many intrinsic "bugs" there seem to be, the cost for the product is too high.

Now, for that cost, we should at least get the following:

Documentation
Where is the rest of the documentation and tutorials on how to actually use this product?? The .pdf User's Guide is a bloated, almost useless 700 pages. The one thing I got out of it is Command Line Switches. The product has a ton of features not even mentioned. Nor does Flexera provide any guidance on complicated and complex installs.

Community Support
I surf the boards almost daily now and Flexera Support staff NEVER post ANY solutions to ACTUAL problems. Why?? Is this a ploy to force us to buy very expensive support contracts? Maybe this goes hand in hand with poor documentation.

The last three weeks of working with this product have been uncomfortably and unnecessarily challenging to say the least.

In this economy, I would expect more from a company who's core business is helping others package their products to get ahead and move things forward. Good luck with this rather interesting business model. I hope you see real competition soon.

I do have some real feedback on what works and what does not when attempting to build advanced installers and would love to chat with a Flexera staff member. Feel free to message me for details.

Thanks!

[jerome_IA]

I have many things to say about this but I will try to summarize.

I have been requested to check for feasibility for specific localization which I do not use actually. I well know InstallAnywhere product and I scheduled my work to x working hours. I almost achieve the work and it cost me about 10 times my schedule... this is really expensive and I still have a headache on!

- InstallAnywhere is supposed to be a multi-platform product, but if you look inside the xml, since Flexera bought this product, every new feature uses platform specific path separators!!!!! How stupid it is!!.
Some example: external bundle path inside the xml is "/" on linux & "\" on windows. $INSTALLER_DATA$/locale_files/installer_locales/custom_en.properties
Thus if you have developers using the same xml on linux & windows, this cannot work.
Question, why don't they use (like everyone of us is doing) "$/$" separators in their own product???????
- Another feature recently added was ".ico" files for shortcuts, look how the xml link to those files:

$INSTALLER_DATA$/Icons/

home/build/Icons/SomeIcon.ico
=> I do not understand why this was developed like this as it prevents building your installer if the "tempICOFile" stupid path does not exist on the build computer and the ICOPath used "/" instead of "$/$".

- Also, I tried building none-Latin language for my installer. It tooks me hours to discover that when you are using properties file, such language does not work & your installer defaults to english while if you build without properties file, it works well (I do not yet reported this issue as well as many others). As I really need to use properties file, I found a workaround by only defining configuration name in my properties file and having the rest configured from the UI.
- Also using text properties file, you cannot specify the vm to use (it will always fail and use the first found vm), while using xml properties file, it works ... This issue is opened since few years now.
- You can localize almost everything but not the background image ... They told me this will be in some feature release...
- Documentation about localization ... There are tons of small part everywhere, examples are very poor.
- Maybe also you've noticed when opening support ticket to Flexera, those are never closed, they usually doesn't provide workaround or any help excepted telling "yes this is a bug and will be fixed in some version that they cannot told you" and trying to find your issue in their knowledge base using the #IOA... you almost never find it.
- Whenever I open a ticket for a simple question and I got answer, then they close the ticket and I am receiving email for "How well did Flexera Software Support serve you?" But for 'real' tickets which are never closed and for which I am not satisfied I never got this email.
- There are tons of dead links in their site pointing to acresso or older sites.
- Each time I upgrade, I've feeling being beta tester and I ofter get back to previous version because of issues in new one that require SP1 or path that came weeks later.

Ok, that's enough for now... I don't need to tell you that I am very satisfied with this product! 😉

--Jerome

[madhavbantwal]

Hi All,

Please post your queries here.

We would be more than happy to help you have the best experience using InstallAnywhere.

Thanks,
Madhav Pai

[jerome_IA]

madhavbantwal wrote:
Hi All,

Please post your queries here.

We would be more than happy to help you have the best experience using InstallAnywhere.

Thanks,
Madhav Pai

Hi,

Thanks for your concern, so I will have few additional things to post (let me know if I have to open support incidents for this):

1/ We are several waiting for a fix for this: http://community.flexerasoftware.com/showthread.php?t=200481 , do you have more info regarding this?
2/ New issue: Using external resource bundle for resolving Product Name (Project/info/ProductName) does not work for console mode installation
e.g.
Launching installer...

===============================================================================
$L{ExternalLocales.InstallerInfoData.ProducName} (created with InstallAnywhere)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3/ Due to above "2/" issue, I had to replace locale variable with build time variable but can't build with ant as explain here
I worked around this by using ant filterset but that can be only a temporary solution....

--Jerome

PS: I am using IA 2011 SP2.

[jerome_IA]

I can't resit sharing again my experience with the product....

I got solution for my point "3/" which is to use parameter "buildtimevarpropfile" with ant.

4/ So this will be new point "4/", build time variable are not resolved for "Product Name" substitution if the locales is other than english. Point which I really need to address because of point "2/". I opened a new support incident for this #SIOC-000124208.
=> Thus I will use back my previous workaround (filterset with ant)
=> Reason for this is that the locales/custom_ file are not updated and so contain @ProductName@. While those should have been substituted by the "buildtimevarpropfile" like it is in the XML file

5/ When I run my installer in console mode (if my build configuration uses more than one locale), the installer crash trying to display the language selection:
==========================================
1- ENGLISH
2-

Invocation of this Java Application has caused an InvocationTargetException. This application will now exit. (LAX)

Stack Trace:
java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: -1
at java.util.Vector.elementAt(Vector.java:430)
at ZeroGh4.b(DashoA10*..)
at ZeroGh4.promptAndGetValue(DashoA10*..)
==========================================
It works well in graphical mode.

=> This is something that has been fixed in SP3 (choose default language) because it does not crash when built with this version.
So I will be obliged upgrading to 2011 SP3 despite point "1/"
=> This will cost me money (in addition to the time I spent debugging the product) because I'll need to ask translation for new shorter prompts to alter existing i18nresources files.
I finally found better workaround for point "1/" and posted it into thread linked

--Jerome
Modified things appear in this color