Preparing Your Installation for Internet Distribution

InstallShield 2016 Express Edition

The way in which consumers receive software is rapidly changing. Before the advances in Internet technology and the introduction of high-speed connections, all software was shipped on some type of removable medium, such as floppy disks or CD-ROMs. Today, many people download their software directly from the Internet. In order to take advantage of this time- and money-saving software distribution process, you must package your installation in an easily downloadable and installable manner.

There are several criteria that your Web-ready installation may need to meet:

Compressed Size

Although many people now connect to the Internet through high-speed cable modems or DSL lines, others still use lower-speed modems. Package size is very important to people with slower connections due to the increased amount of online time required to download an application.

Self-Extracting

Many file compression utilities require a special client-side application to decompress the application files. This need for another utility complicates the download and installation process for users. To simplify the installation process, the compression utility you use should be self-extracting, so no other application is required.

Digitally Signed

To make your customers feel more secure about downloading and installing your software, you can digitally sign your application package. The digital signature identifies you and/or your company to end users and assures them that the application code has not been altered or tampered with since publication. To learn how to digitally sign your application, see Digital Signing and Security.

Easy to Use

Perhaps the most important aspect of packaging your installation for Internet distribution is making it easy to use. Your customers may not want to specify a location where the installation files should be saved and then search their computer to locate those files. Instead, the setup should be seamlessly integrated into the compression package, requiring only one step to begin the installation.

Proxy Server Support

You may want to configure your installation to download certain files only if they are needed on the target system. For example, the Windows Installer engine, the .NET Framework, and some InstallShield prerequisites may already be present on some or most target systems. Instead of embedding these files in your installation (which would increase your overall installation size), you can configure your project so that only the ones that are needed are downloaded at run time.

If your end users access the Internet through a proxy server and your installation is configured to download files, the installation uses the system proxy settings that are manually configured in Internet Explorer during the download. This occurs even if another browser on the target system is the default browser.

Note that InstallShield does not include support for the Automatically Detect Settings functionality in Internet Explorer. (If end users have the Automatically Detect Settings check box selected in Internet Explorer for their LAN connection and the installation needs to download files, the installation fails because the files cannot be downloaded. If it is possible that your end users may have the Automatically Detect Settings check box selected in Internet Explorer for their LAN connections, you may want to embed all of the files in your installation rather than configure them to be downloaded; if the files are embedded, the failures can be avoided.) However, InstallShield does support the Automatic Configuration Script functionality that is set up for LAN connections in Internet Explorer.

See Also

Creating a Web-Deployable Release

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