As you rightly observe, Wisescript has remained essentially unchanged for the last 15 years, apart from minor tweaks to allow property values to be exchanged with MSI installs when wisescript is used for custom actions.

The next logical improvement, porting Wisescript to 64 bit, has been in the request queue for a long time, but in my opinion is unlikely to happen anytime soon, as the work required is considerable and is unlikely to generate enough revenue to justify the development costs.

Wise products have been culled by the removal of Wise Installation Studio and Express from the catalogue last April, so only Wise Package Studio remains as an ongoing product.

Due to resource cuts at Symantec during the global financial problems, the company lost a number of development and support staff, so I think they will just continue to milk some existing products until they die of neglect, rather than actually killing them off.

There is still a viable user base for WPS as it's a nicer tool than many competitors, but eventually the lack of development will force users increasingly to seek alternative suppliers. 

Thank you for your feedback.  Let's just say WPS will die off and soon.   What other tool would you suggest to package with?  Or what do you feel are the top 2 packaging tools?  (not including WPS of course)

And, are there any other tools that have a scripting tool like Wise Script Editor?  It is the one tool that rocks.  But I am now at a new company that has no packaging tools and no packaging stardards and it is up to me to pick a tool for our Windows 7 app packging so I'd like to pick the "right" tool :-)

Thanks for any help you can provide.

InstallShield. You can download a 30-day trial version.

EdT, you wrote:  

WPS will not die off soon as it is part of a larger strategy within Symantec and will be part of an Altiris suite for a long time to come. Hopefully a more detailed roadmap will emerge in the coming months. 

On AppDeploy.com other senior techs strongly believe that Symantec has little interest in WPS and don't even plan to upgrade Wise Script Edit to fully support 64-bit.  From what I am now reading everyone says to go with InstallSheild/AdminStudio.   Question for you:  Will Symantec upgrade the Wise Script Editor within WPS to work with 64-bit OS's and will they also upgrade WPS?  The last upgrade from 7.03 to 8.0 was not a true upgrade, it is more like v7.04. 

I ask this since I know and like WPS, I think the Script Editor is the best scripting tool going but I need to direct my company in the right direction and I don't want to pick a tool that will not be supported or that has fallen way behind its rivals.  

Thanks for your feedback.

I am not an employee of Symantec, so cannot give you any definitive answers to your questions, only my opinions. I do not think that anyone in Symantec could give you any guarantees either, as product strategy is constantly under review, as they have a huge product portfolio but not unlimited development resources. A lot of the companies that Symantec buy are small companies, and so it is not surprising to find that many staff either choose to advance their careers in another part of Symantec, or to move to another small company where decision making and investment is not such a long winded process. Either way, there tends to be a loss of the best developers and the best support staff as their skills are readily transferable so the product development inevitably suffers.

However, the position of WPS as a component of one of the Altiris deployment suites has been fixed for some time, and that suite is a product under active development - it was one of the main reasons that Symantec acquired Altiris. Therefore, it is my view that Symantec will have to maintain WPS as it would be stupid to ship a tool that is incompatible with Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2, if the Altiris suite fully supports those environments.

Once Microsoft released MSI technology, and it became a vital requirement for Logo compliance, non MSI packaging tools effectively became end-of-life, and Wisescript was one of them. However, due to its flexibility and popularity, it was the natural choice as a tool for writing custom actions, and was extended to allow exchange of property values.

If there are ever any 64 bit enhancements to Wisescript, my feeling is that they would focus on enabling more complete support in a custom action role, and they would not contemplate producing a tool that can create standalone 64 bit installs. MSI already does this so why reinvent the wheel?

So what do I think - I think that WPS will be updated at some point, but timescales were never discussed by Wise and that has not changed under either Altiris or Symantec direction. Sometime in the next year would be my guess.

On the other hand, both the Installshield and the InstallAware products are mainstream products for the companies concerned, and there is a considerable development effort going on all the time, with regular updates and new releases.

What YOU have to decide in the context of your company's requirements, is exactly what sort of packaging tool you actually need?  Do you need a full blown packaging tool with capture engine? Do you need 64 bit capture capability ?  Do you need integration with Visual Studio?  Do you need a scripting tool?  Do you have experience in VBScripting or writing DLLs ?  Are you likely to use temporary workers in your packaging area?

Wise and Installshield are probably the most well known packaging toolsets, so if you rely on temporary staff at any point, these two toolsets are likely to be the easiest to find skilled staff for.

The other aspect is training overhead. If you have an environment already experienced in WPS then there will inevitably be a training cost in moving to a new tool, as well as the cost of the tool itself.  However, this would be offset to some degree by the newest tools having built in support for current operating systems and development tools and therefore requiring less work to produce packages.

Since each environment has its own different requirements, if you are an existing Wise user, what you should do is determine what aspects of your individual requirements are no longer met by Wise, and how significant these are going forward. Many shortfalls have simple workarounds and therefore prove to be insignificant.  WPS 8, for example, does not really add support for Windows Installer 5, but is this really a significant issue?  Most software vendors continue to support Windows 2000 and Windows XP and will continue to do so for a long time to come, so are not going to produce MSI files that require a windows installer version greater than 2.0 or 3.0.

If you want a regularly updated tool with support for all the latest technologies, then your only option today is a switch away from Wise.  If Wise meets most of your needs and you have an established track record with the tool, then you need to evaluate what your specific needs are going to be over the next couple of years.

EdT, thank you for taking the time to write such an informative response.   You made many good points.   Right now at our company we use SMS 2003 and all packages are .CMD files that are pushed by SMS and then each .CMD runs/calls other .MSI or .EXE files.  Not the best method but it sort of works :-)   I've gone to the InstalShield site and I've looked at AdminStudio online and they all do cool things but I have not found (yet) any of them saying they have a built in scripting tool.  I am Not a VBScript guy and in fact I have never used it.  I've always used Wisescript and WinBatch.  Does InstallShield or AdminStudio have any scripting tool build in that is not VB?

And thanks again for your time, it has been very helpful.

Matt

I am not up to speed with the latest Installshield Adminstudio releases, but I'm sure the forums at appdeploy or at installsite.org would be able to answer any specific feature questions on any Installshield product.

Winbatch is a cool tool - I've been using it since 1995 and its capabilities are only limited by your imagination. VBScript is not hugely different, so if you want to have a quick look at how it works, grab the Windows Scripting Host download from Microsoft.com and open the script56.chm help file (it might have a larger number nowadays as version 5.6 is quite old).

Each command has code samples attached in both vbscript and jscript, so it won't take you long to pick up the syntax, and there are plenty of examples kicking around in past postings in the Wise forums  (eg search on CreateObject ).  So if you are comfortable scripting in Winbatch you are not going to find it hard to pick up VBScript, and there are plenty of code samples on the internet if you need some code to get you started.

Realistically, there is little to stop you using Winbatch for your custom actions - although if you do this it would make life simpler if you added all the standard and extender DLLs to your operating system's System32 folder so that you can just use the small EXE compile option. One thing that Winbatch lacks is the ability to exchange property values with the MSI, but not all custom actions require this function, and there is always the registry for passing values back and forth.