Is InstallShield 2010 really necessary to support Windows 7 (against using InstallShield 12)

Question

I have received an e-mail from Flexera containing the following statement:

"We understand that many of our customers still using InstallShield 12 maybe having difficulties sending installations to Windows 7 desktops, 64 Bit servers or R2 2008.

Therefore we would like to provide this opportunity for you to erase these potential / current problems and upgrade despite InstallShield 12 being End of Life’d some time ago."

We have not had any problems ourselves. I am interested to hear if anyone else has had any issues or whether this is a scare to get us to upgrade unnecessarily.

I did examine in some detail the differences at the original end-of-life notice but could not see any issues that affected our installations.

Interestingly they call this an 'amnesty' - almost implying we are criminals for not upgrading (cf OED).

Answer 1

Don't get me wrong, there are several other improvements to consider since IS12, but especially if you are creating .msi installations, you can probably continue to use IS12. In fact, if you are creating patches, you should continue to use the same version of IS that the base used until you can hop a major upgrade. You'll hit the occasional bug or feature limitation, and in particular Windows PCA may misidentify installers due to aged manifests (See InstallShield 2010 SP1's release notes for that).

If you have time to evaluate whether the upgrade it worth your while, I'd suggest starting with the release notes (search for InstallShield 20xx Release Notes, with xx as 08, 09, and 10 so far).

Answer 2

Strictly speaking, no. But really it depends on the InstallShield features being used by your installer(s). IS12 is a pretty good product and if you aren't hitting any roadblocks then go ahead and stay put. If I was on a version prior to 12 I'd be upgrading for certain.