WinMason

WinMason is a generic program installer. It works by replicating Pilot-Installations onto other machines by installation scripts. These scripts are created once and halfautomatically.

I call it a generic installer because WinMason dies not dependend on any existing installers. For example, WinMason won't call D:\SETUP.EXE /N for some obscure and usually undocumented network installation mode of your favorite Office application. Doing it that way won't be generic: most programs don't come with a "network" installation method. And we want to install all applications automatically, won't we? Therefore we do our own installation scripts. WinMason just executes them.

The creation of those installation scripts is straightforward. You start making a snapshot of the current system. After this, you install your application, low-level hardware driver or software update. You can also apply the customizations you want. Once you're done with that, you compare your previous system state with your new system state. The differences are exported to text files.

The next step is to place the installation script onto the file server. The system comparation might have found addition, modifications or deletions of files, registry entries or INI file entries. So you need to gather the added and modified files via WinMason. WinMason places all this information in subdirectories below the installation script.

And finally you can re-execute the scripts at as much PCs as you want. WinMason will just be happy to do exactly the same additions, modifications or deletions to files, registry entries and INI files and the target system. No, not exactly the same: it knows about the versioning of Windows DLLs, so it won't overwrite your modern MSVCRT.DLL with an old one.

Screen Shoots

Everyone likes screen shoots. This is a picture where WinMason just installed the various listed patches and is about to install Office:

You can clearly see that WinMason did not overwrite some font files. This was because the files installed by the "Windows: Euro character support" where newer then the fonts that came with the Office Service Release.

Some seconds later:

Here you can see the (german) comment at the telling you "Have fun with your work". That's a little indication that those installations scripts can do more than just installing files. We have conditional execution, messageboxes, intelligent and forced execution of scripts and so on.

Maybe you look into the (german) installation time table. I once measured a complete Windows installation with a stop watch. Are your installations as fast as mine?