Yesterday I published instructions on how to do a silent install of Aptify and it prompted the question of how to silently uninstall it. This may be desirable when upgrading between major version releases so that you don’t have extra versions of Aptify on your users’ desktops. Luckily the same basic technique that was used for the silent install can be utilized for the silent uninstall. The examples and screen shot below are from the removal of the Aptify 4.5 client. Again, there will be slight differences depending on the particular installer you used so you have to go through the steps to generate your own uninstallation command and Installshield answer file.

1. Locate the uninstall string for your version of Aptify. You will find it in a subkey of the uninstall key in Windows. You will know it when you see the DisplayName value match what you see in Add/Remove Programs in Windows. The location of the uninstall key is as follows.
   • “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall” (64-bit Windows)
   • “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall” (32-bit Windows)

   Within the uninstall key you will find a number of values. Here is what the key looks like for Aptify 4.5.

   

   Regedit view of Aptify 4.5 Uninstall Key

2. Copy the UninstallString command prompt. You can drop all the extra parameters from it and just append “/r”. The setup executable is the same one used for installing Aptify and accepts the same parameters. This time we are going to record the uninstallation of the product. Run through the uninstaller as you would by hand. Again, the setup.iss file will be deposited in the windows folder for you.

   "C:\Program Files (x86)\InstallShield Installation Information\{4B58692D-0683-43C2-A777-C3522BB038C1}\setup.exe" /r

3. The generated iss file is your answer file for the uninstall. Feel free to rename it as you please; I renamed mine to “aptify45_uninstall.iss”. You can now launch the uninstaller from a batch file using the following command line which will run silently and not return until the removal is complete and create a log file in your temp folder for diagnostic purposes. The log file is optional and you can remove the entire “/f2″ parameter if you don’t want it.

   start /wait "Aptify 4.5 Uninstall" "C:\Program Files (x86)\InstallShield Installation Information\{4B58692D-0683-43C2-A777-C3522BB038C1}\setup.exe" /s /sms /f1"c:\aptify45_uninstall.iss" /f2"%temp%\aptify45_uninstall.log"

Notes

• I did notice when I tested this procedure earlier that there were a couple windows that flashed on the screen during removal. If you run the uninstall under the user’s account that is logged in you may see those flashes. However, if you run it using a different account such as when remotely executing a command line then the user won’t see anything because the uninstaller will not have permission to draw to the user’s screen. You probably won’t care about the flashes even if you see them but this is relevant if you are bent on flying under the radar.
• Just because the application has been uninstalled does not mean all traces of it are gone. You may still need to delete the Aptify folder in Program Files and if anyone created custom shortcuts to Aptify they will probably linger as well. I’ll leave it to you to clean that up if you feel the need but it won’t hurt anything.
• You will need to reboot after performing the removal procedure to finalize the uninstall of the product.  It is probably a bad idea to install a newer version of Aptify prior to the reboot because there could be a conflict with the removal procedure that causes the new version of Aptify to only be partially installed.

I’ve been asked about how to install the Aptify client silently in the past. The technique for doing this isn’t Aptify specific. In fact, Aptify doesn’t officially support silent installations. Through a few basic techniques it is possible to install almost anything silently. In the case of Aptify (4.x and 5.x versions) we can use Installshield switches^[1]. In addition to the client we will want to install the Office 2003 Web Components^[2] and the Microsoft DHTML Control^[3] since these are required for full client functionality. Here are the steps.

1. Install the .NET Framework. It needs to be the same version included with the installer or the silent installation will fail when you run it later. In the case of Aptify 5.x it is .NET 3.5. You can download this and install it using the command below^[4]. If you are installing it on Server 08 you don’t need to download this file and can use a built in command to install it from the cached operating system setup files instead.

   start /wait dotnetfx35.exe /q:a /c:"setup.exe /q /norestart" /norestart
   REM if using Server 08 do this instead
   REM servermanagercmd -install Net-Framework-Core

2. Generate an iss file for the Aptify client. I am not going to provide one for you here because there are a few different installers you might be using and the iss file you generate could be different than mine. Simply run the command below for the Aptify installer to generate the ISS file. You only need to do this once.

   setup.exe /r

   Go through the installer normally. Note you can not silently install the application server or the database components so do not check those. This is because they are custom Installshield actions and custom actions do not run silently unless the software publisher has specifically provided support to do so. This is also why we had to install the .NET Framework ahead of time. When you are done, grab the setup.iss file out of the windows directory. (Yes really, the windows directory. Yes, that is a dumb location for that file.) When you install it silently you will use the following command line.

   start /wait setup.exe /s /sms /f1setup.iss /f2"%temp%\aptifysetup.log"

   I added the /f2 parameter to write an installation log file in the temp folder but you can modify the path as your expertise allows.

3. Install the Office Web Components.

   start /wait owc11.exe /quiet

4. Install the Microsoft DHTML Control.

   start /wait msiexec /quiet /i "DhtmlEd.msi" ALLUSERS=1

Thats it! Place all the files in the same folder and create a batch file with the appropriate lines from the text above. If you want to install Aptify automagically to every desktop you can use a login script, push it out with psexec, or use the third party deployment tool of your choosing. Your batch file should look something like this:

@echo off
start /wait dotnetfx35.exe /q:a /c:"setup.exe /q /norestart" /norestart
start /wait setup.exe /s /sms /f1setup.iss /f2"%temp%\aptifysetup.log"
start /wait owc11.exe /quiet
start /wait msiexec /quiet /i "DhtmlEd.msi" ALLUSERS=1

P.S. Don’t forget to reboot!