ActivInspire Group Policy Upgrade Problem

This is an FYI to Promethean and a warning to others.

I deployed version 1.6.5 last week over 1.6.43. Group policy did not automatically place 1.6.43 in the "Packages that this package will upgrade" section of the deployment's properties. As a result, 1.6.5 installed over 1.6.43 rather than it uninstalling it beforehand. The desktop shortcuts on teachers' computers were left pointing to 1.6.43 which attempted an MSI repair but this halted with a warning about a newer version being installed. Similarly for file associations, flip-charts were associated with 1.6.43 and a repair was attempted when trying to open them. ActivInspire could not be opened by any teachers in the school.

The quick fix is to deploy a simple shortcut to the ActivInspire executable and have teachers use this instead of the 1.6.43 Windows Installer shortcut still on their desktops.

The full fix is to uninstall 1.6.5, then uninstall 1.6.43, then install 1.6.5 again. (start - run - msiexec /uninstall \\path\to\ActivInspire.msi)

For others to avoid this happening, after adding the MSI to your group policy object, choose Advanced rather than Assign (or go into properties after) and under the Upgrades tab, manually add any previous versions of ActivInspire (from that or other group policy objects).

To Promethean, I think it's just a matter of adding a GUID into the Upgrade table of the MSI. I don't really know enough to point out exactly, but Group Policy should know what MSIs to upgrade. In this case, it did mark 1.4 for upgrading, so maybe it's something to do with point releases vs. build.

This happened before with a previous version of ActivInspire but has never occurred with anything else I've deployed with Group Policy, so please look into it!

Hi there,

Many thanks for the suggestion - I will forward onto Development.

Thanks again!