Last week, Nov 6, 2012, the Flash Player 11.5.502.110 for Active X and Plugin MSI Install and Upgrade were released in the catalog, but the EXE versions were not. Does anyone one know when the EXE versions will be released?
Last week, Nov 6, 2012, the Flash Player 11.5.502.110 for Active X and Plugin MSI Install and Upgrade were released in the catalog, but the EXE versions were not. Does anyone one know when the EXE versions will be released?
This is an isolated incident and will not occur again. We made attempts to encourage our customers to leverage the WMI installer instead of the executable because the WMI package has the distinct advantage of being uninstallable remotely through the Patch Manager console. However, given the level of dependency our customers have on the EXE package, we have decided to continue releasing all future versions of Flash in lockstep for both formats going forward.
This is the experience of our enterprise. Others may have different stories.
Some time many months ago, we had a Flash Player 10 package installed likely as MSI. With the EXE packages, they simply run, identify the currently installed version, and they upgrade it. The old Flash Player 10 still resides historically in C:\windows\installer even though it hasn't been installed on the target machines for over a year in most cases. The MSI installer invokes the last MSI for uninstall, which is the FP 10 package. That package was hosted on our old file server, and since that location doesn't exist, the MSI fails citing that it can't find the original FP 10 install package to remove.
The solution to this requires another step or workaround. You can identify the package ID and location of the old FP 10. It can be removed from each machine with an MSI command. I suppose a packageboot could be added to the current Flash MSI, or you could add something to a GPO or login script to do it. The good thing about this endeavor is that it would allow future MSI packages to work. I tested a couple of target machines, and they worked after the FP 10 entry was safely removed from registry and the Windows installer directory.
The EXE packages only care about what is actually installed, so they just work every time. If you have the time, though, it would be a better strategy to run the above task and make way for future MSI support. As mentioned, with the MSI, you could control uninstalls through Patch Manager.
That's my story.
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