Our office, overall, is very small. That said, we do have enough people for a separate group of BAs, Developers, QA Analysts, and Project Managers. We are going through the process of establishing new procedures and policies as we have just grown to add those BAs, QAAs, and PMs.
While we have added those roles (and people), two of the Development Team also serve in the role of DBA/Data Administrators (with myself as one of those individuals).
In our new environment, the QA folks would like to get a release from the Development Team and then move that release forward into the UAT or Production environments without going back to members of the Development Team. As a Data Administrator of the Production environment, I will not allow a non-Data Administrator to send non-approved SQL to the centralized DBAs (I'm in government), nor would the DBAs accept non-approved SQL from anyone else.
My solution is to utilize InstallShield to create both a Client-side and Server-side installer. This would allow me to bundle SQL into the installer and ensure that QA (or anyone else) could not send bad SQL to our Production DBAs.
Should these be two separate projects within InstallShield? I would prefer one that builds two separate installers. My concern would involve the GUIDs and un-installation.
Thoughts?
BTW, how do I dynamically change the name from "setup.exe" to something like "Acme.5.3.0.00172.Server.exe" during the Release/Build process?
David, I would make these separate projects if I were you. The concerns you cite regarding uninstalling, etc. are valid to me. Regarding naming of the setup.exe you can click on the Releases icon in the Installation Designer and then click on the Project_Assistant. Locate the setup file name property (which defaults to setup) and change it to be whatever you want the name of the .exe to be.
