If you are using User Account Control (UAC) in your desktop environment, Windows Installer will request that you elevate an installer. The elevation request typically comes at the end of the installation wizard interview, just before the main installation transaction starts.
Tthe Enterprise Vault Add-In Installer has to perform some specific operations that require the installation to be elevated at the start of the installation wizard. For this reason the installer will check to see whether UAC is enabled and whether elevation has already taken place. If UAC is enabled and the installer has not been elevated it will show the following message and quit with an error:
You cannot install the Symantec Enterprise Vault Outlook Add-In by launching this MSI file directly. You must launch setup.exe. For more information, contact your administrator.
To help you work around this issue you can use the setup.exe alongside the MSI packages which will ensure that users are prompted for elevation before the installer is launched. The setup.exe does not accept command line switches for silent installation.
If you need to install the Add-in silently on a UAC-enabled machine e.g. using the /qn parameter for msiexec.exe then you must ensure that the process launching the installer is elevated.
If you launch the installer using a process that does not interact with the desktop, such as a service, elevation is not required, whether UAC is enabled or not.
If you are need to run the installer in a user session from the command line or another bootstrapping application, then you must ensure that the process is elevated, or can elevate itself before launching the installer. If you run the command from a batch file then you can launch it using the Right Click> Run As Administrator command.
If this option is not suitable then there are other techniques you can use to ensure that the MSI is run elevated from the start.
- It's possible to repackage the MSI file inside a self-extracting executable which will be elevated. There are many tools for doing this, including the iexpress tool that ships with Windows. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/197147 for more details
- You can also use tools to make a batch script re-launch itself as elevated if it is not already elevated. See http://blogs.technet.com/b/elevationpowertoys/archive/2010/06/20/creating-a-self-elevating-script.aspx for more details.
