Deploying Autodesk Inventor 2009 with Configuration Manager 2007

I had the pleasure of working with a customer this week to prepare some Cad applications for distribution with Configuration Manager. On the list was Inventor from Autodesk.



So the Inventor suite consists of 5 applications and 7 prerequisites. Autodesk provides a tool that generates a giant .ini and wrapper setup.exe to deploy these applications and prerequisites for you. We did actually try to run this in the task sequence, but found the setup.exe spawns another setup.exe process and then exits with a non-zero exit code of 103. The applications installed, but the web reporting showed a failure. Not very good for deploying as you would never know which systems really failed and which were successful.



I love task sequences with Configuration Manager so it didn't take much for us to decide to deploy the Inventor by using task sequences. The coolest thing about task sequences is the ability to determine which task item caused a failure via web reporting. It makes tracking your software deployments much easier to determine root cause of failures.



We first created a giant package of the Autodesk created folder containing all the applications, prerequisites, setup and .ini. After reviewing the .ini generated by Autodesk we were able to determine the applications and prerequisites. We then just created task sequence items for each application and prerequisite (except the MSI update).



This worked great with 2 exceptions:

1. Thje Inventor MSI itself insisted on being run from the autodesk setup. It would error out when we attempted to run the MSI directly. To resolve this we installed Microsoft ORCA and opened up the Inventor MSI. We located Launch Conditions and then deleted the row with the condition that the MSI be launched by the setup.


2. One of the prerequisite applications (Microsoft WSE 3.0) had spaces in the MSI name. We had been using the Run Command Line task item so we didn't need to create a SMS-style program for each task item (too much work). However we couldn't run the MSI with spaces in the name with the Run Command line, so in this case we did create one SMS style program and just ran it.

The actual task sequence is posted up on http://www.systemcentertools.com/otherutils.html !