Previous policy when Altiris were the parent for Wise was that service packs were available free of charge.
Symantec may have changed this policy.

I will check with the Wise PM

Good that there is finally some information about the scheduled release:

https://kb.altiris.com/article.asp?article=41231&p=1

Minor updates continue to be free at the present time.
Major updates (eg V7 to V8) require a maintenance agreement or a new purchase.

The KB article refers to early Q2 for SP2, then mentions March, which in my calendar is late Q1.
Previous tentative release date was Dec 2009, so it's only slipping by a few months.
I believe regression testing has started, however.

Thank !

Using Wise in an enterprise development environment is just plain painful at this point.  Symantec has all but left this product in the dumpster. 

WPS 8 was released back in October and has a number of updates incorporated including support for Visual Studio 2008, .NET 3.5, etc, as per the release notes in the Altiris KB.

WIS 7 SP2 is under development and should appear in the forseeable future although I cannot give out any further information until the official release.

Many corporates are still using old versions such as WPS 6 and WFWI 6 for mainstream packaging - although there have been many changes to the windows installer service in the Vista and Win 7 releases, software developers and packagers are still having to support Win 2000 and XP as these operating systems far outnumber Vista and Win 7 currently.

Symantec, like many other software companies, had to cut back on development and support in many areas due to the financial crisis which affected much of the world, but hopefully we will see some movement this year.

Seems that it is out. Here are the Release Notes:

https://kb.altiris.com/article.asp?article=51859&p=1

I've had a look in both the License Management Portal and also the Trialware Downloads area, and the available versions are still at SP1.
What I am trying to clarify also, is what level of Windows 7 support is in there, as the release notes state that there is support for Windows 7, but at the same time, the list of available windows installer versions you can select appears to stop at 4.5, which is the Vista version, as windows 7 uses V5.0
This could of course be a typo, but at the same time it is possible that the product is not *fully* compatible as Windows 7 has only been released since last August. (!!)....

The PM has confirmed that the KB article has been released prematurely. If I get any further information that I can post here, then I will let you know.

Judging from the release notes SP2 will relieve a lot of pain for web application installs.  How will everyone be notified when it is officially released?

I will try and keep an eye on this, but in the past, the releases have tended to creep out without any fanfare, so the easiest way to watch for this is to monitor the version of the WIS7 eval download.

Ummmm... what is this?

http://www.solutionsam.com/Solutions/public/altirisdl/eval/wis_7_00_sp2.exe

It's digitally signed by Symantec Corporation with a file version of 7.4.0.214.

Thanks for publishing the link. I have asked the Wise PM if this is the final release rather than a beta.

I can't imagine why they haven't gotten back to you yet, but then it's not really surprising considering their attentiveness to this product.

Well, another day slipped by.  Must be terribly hard for the Wise PM to locate this information.  Perhaps they should enlist Leonard Nimoy to go "In Search Of"....?

The PM's email is Mike_Grueber@symantec.com

Why not drop him an email and see if you can get a response.
Maybe he's just fed up with me asking....

Yeah, an email from me would definitely get his attention...

I suspect that he hasn't replied to you because he's seen the writing on the wall with respect to Wise and is busy looking for another job.

Mike has other product management responsibilities within Symantec, and I suspect some prioritisation of tasks has to be applied.
However, if you're convinced that you're efforts would be wasted here, then all I can say is sit back and wait until the news leaks out in the usual way.

I was being facetious, of course.  While I truly expect that he is a busy person, how long would it really take?

Thanks for your efforts.

Depends on your typing speed. One minute, maybe two.

I just got a reply from Mike Grueber who indicated SP2 is released!

It can be downloaded from the TrialWare link on http://www.symantec.com/business/wise-installation-studio.

If you already have WIS 7.0 SP1, it seems you'll need to uninstall WIS 7.0 and then reinstall SP2 with your license key. Note, the install directory has moved to C:\Program Files\Symantec\Wise.

On the Installation Expert / Windows Installer Options, there are some new UAC Compatibility Settings. The "Elevate Entire Installation" option is used by a new custom action (WiseElevate) that triggers a UAC prompt at the beginning of the UI sequence to allow the IIS launch checks to work correctly on Server 2008.

That's rich: a company selling Windows Installer tools forcing you to do a manual uninstall of the product before going from SP1 to SP2.  I wonder why they did it that way.  Perhaps the Nalperion stuff?

I'm guessing the uninstall / reinstall has to with both Nalperion and the company name change. Last time our company changed names it was a pain to move all the files and reg keys (basically everything moved) so it was easier to require an uninstall/reinstall than do develop and support the upgrade.

Also with each company name change is typically a headcount reduction, which would probably account for the 2+ years since the last release. Not an excuse, just a reality of big business and the times.

Can anybody explain why the option "Elevate Entire installation" under Windows Installer Options -  UAC Compatibility Settings is disabled (grayed) if "Use Restart Manager" is not selected? It seems to be more a bug than a feature.

I also managed to select both "No elevation required" and "Elevate Deferred Execution sequence only" at the same time (have "Elevate Defferrect Execution sequence only" selected, click on "No elevation required" and press "No" in the next dialog).

DeanW:  Would a major upgrade not have been able ot handle the new folder structure?

I haven't personally tried that, but I imagine with enough time and money anything is possible. The apps I develop MSI's for have many custom actions and are tricky to get all the conditions defined correctly to handle all MSI modes (including upgrades). Due to time/resource limitations we have had to chose to limit our install to what always works for us  - service packs for small updates and uninstall/reinstall for major (incompatible) updates. Not the ideal user experience, but less expensive to implement for our user base.

So I just installed SP2 after thoroughly cleansing SP1 from my system.  I only ever install WiseScript and WfWI (I have no need for Mobile installs or virtual ones.)  It got to 99% done and hung there for awhile.  Then I noticed it was hung because of a pop-under msg.  The msg told me that I don't have the rights to make the necessary changes on my XP system and how I should try again with an Administrator account.  I'm a domain administrator as well as the local network admin and general IT guy so I'm not quite clear on what it expected.  I clicked OK and the install finished successfully.  I don't like seeing funny, non-errors during an installation.  It definitely doesn't instill peace of mind in me.  The event log was its usual helpful self so no clues there.

Anyone else seen this?

Confirmation from Product Manager:   "Yes, it is correct.   We will only be selling Wise Package Studio on a go-forward basis."

Hi EdT.
Thanks for cheking this out.
Does anyone know is there any easy way to convert the Wise installation Studio project to Wise Package Studio.
And what's the diference?
Thanks in advance.

Wise Installation Studio and Wise Package studio run with very similar codesets for both the Wisescript editor and the Windows installer Editor, and the projects are essentially interchangeable, so you should not have any issues opening a WIS7 project in WPS 8.
The differences in the two products are outlined a in feature grid somewhere on the Symantec site, which I would recommend you look for to get a complete picture.

However, in brief, the WPS toolkit adds a capture engine, a software manager tool and a conflict manager tool which allow corporate management of conflicts between different MSI files. You can also import entire operating system builds and conflict manage against the files in the build too. WPS does require an SQL server installation to be available, but you can use the free SQL Server Express 2005 or 2008 for this. Setup of SQL Server Express is detailed in a KB article if you need it. You can download an eval of WPS 8 and get some testing done if you wish.

Hi Rob,
The link you posted for solutionsam was already in this thread in an earlier posting.
The eval download is unfortunately no longer available as WIS7 is no longer a current product.

The download link for WIS SP2 at http://www.symantec.com/business/wise-installation-studio is gone.  I think that Symantec should still make SP2 available because plenty of us licensed users of WIS 7.0 could use it. 

The download for WIS SP2 from this link is valid as of 6/16/2010:

http://www.solutionsam.com/Solutions/public/altirisdl/eval/wis_7_00_sp2.exe.

On my PC I had v7.3.0.250 (not sure which SP level that is).  
When I tried to install SP2, it flashed on the screen a few times
but didn't do anything.  The SP2 installer then stalled in running
and had to be closed with Task Manager.

After removing Wise Installation Studio v7.3.0.250 and then installing
SP2, the new version is 7.4.0.214.

A comment about WSP v8.0:  If you want to use the WiseScript Editor you have to buy the pricer Professional version.  Most of why I still use WIS v7.00 is the easy to use WiseScript Editor so upgrading is not cost effective.  If WIS v7.0 SP2 works OK in Win7 (and it seems to) then I'll be using it for a while and I'll start looking for a replacement.

It has been a good ten-year run Wise.  Sorry to see you go. 

V 7.3.0.250 is SP1. The SP2 release was intended to provide compatibility with Windows 7 and add Visual Studio 2008 support. The Wisescript editor remains 32 bit in all products, so when you are looking for an alternative, you should consider whether you need 64 bit capability.

So, is Wise Installation Studio 7 SP2 available?  And if so, where can I download it?

Two postings up from yours is the following statement:

The download for WIS SP2 from this link is valid as of 6/16/2010:

http://www.solutionsam.com/Solutions/public/altirisdl/eval/wis_7_00_sp2.exe.

Is there some reason you were unable to see this?